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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



DANCiERS AND DUTIES. 



TALKS TO MEN AND WOMEN. 



BY ^' 

DUDLEY WARD RHODES, 

RECTOR CHURCH OF OUR SAVIOUR, CINCINNATI, OHIO, AUTHOR OF '' CREED 
AND greed/' "essays ON MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE,'' ETC., ETC. 



,/ 



r 



PHILADELPHIA: 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 
1880. 



i>^'4t 



Copyright, 1880, by Dudley Ward Rhodes. 



TO LAUEA, 



WHO, DURING FIVE YEARS OF MARRIED LIFE, HAS TAUGHT 
ME HOW SPLENDID THE CHARACTER OF WOMAN- 
HOOD IS, AND THAT OF MANHOOD 
OUGHT TO BE, TO THE 

MOTHER OF MY CHILDREN, 

I DEDICATE THIS CHILD OF MY BRAIN, WITH A THANKFUL 

HEART THAT GOD MADE HER MY WIFE, AND 

THE PERPETUAL SUNSHINE OF MY 

HOME. 



Ill 



PEEFAOE. 



^' Shot your guns/^ said Napoleon as he stood on 
the gates of the Tuileries and saw the Directory's bat- 
teries firing blank-cartridges into the swarming ranks 
of the insurrectionists. '^ Shot your guns/' is the most 
important thing for the pulpit to learn to-day. We 
need more definite, practical, personal attack upon the 
evils and dangers of to-day. Men do not care to listen 
to preaching which is only a feeble echo of .the words 
which moved the world in the days of the Schoolmen. 
That world has passed away. " All things have be- 
come new.^^ The ministry is naturally conservative. 
It must cling to its institutions and organization by 
the necessity of its creed. But while it must forever 
fight a wild radicalism, it ought to fight it with the 
most recent and effective weapons. There is a mighty 
chasm between Hastings, fought with bow and arrow, 
and Sedan, with mitrailleuse and needle-gun, and there 
ought to be as much change in the arsenal of the pulpit. 
We must change our methods. We must interest men 
by preaching to them as sensibly and practically and 
wisely as men talk to them in business and in politics, 
as lawyers talk to juries. 

These talks, which are now put before the public, 



Vi PREFACE. 

lay claim to nothing else than such plainness of speech, 
such direct attack upon the ordinary sins and errors of 
men and women as are to be found every day. I have 
sacrificed all other considerations to this one of shot- 
ting my guns and hitting something that I think 
wrong. Those who seek fine writing or brilliant rhet- 
oric must go to other books. But I hope some men and 
some women may find here words fitly spoken in love 
and sincerity, warning against sin, pleading for virtue, 
suggesting possible excellence, and carrying with them 
God's blessing in the career to which I now commit 
them. 

Kectory Church of Our Saviour, 

Cincinnati, Ohio, September, 1880. 



OOI^TEKTS, 



PAGS 

Unreasoning Scepticism 7 

The Genuineness and Authority of the IvTew Testa- 
ment 27 

Possibility and Fact of Miracles .... 47 

Amusements . . . ' 66 

Eeading 87 

Habits 107 

The Ideal Manhood 126 

Ingersollism : Its Purpose and Spirit .... 145 

Girlhood 166 

"Wifehood . 183 

Motherhood 201 

Spinsters . . 218 

The Bread- Winner . 235 

Fallen Women 253 



Vll 



DANGERS AND DUTIES. 



UNREASONING SCEPTICISM. 

The Earl of Chatham, writing to his young nephew 
at Cambridge, said to him : 

" I come now to the part of the advice I have to offer 
you, which most surely concerns your welfare, and upon 
which every good and honorable purpose of your life 
will assuredly turn. I mean the keeping up in your 
heart the true sentiments of religion. K you are not 
right towards God you can never be so towards man. 
The noblest sentiment of the human heart is here 
brought to the test. Is gratitude among the number 
of a man^s virtues ? If it be, the highest benefactor 
demands the warmest returns of gratitude, love, and 
praise. Ingratum qui dixerity omnia dixit (he who calls 
one ungrateful has said everything). If a man wants 
this virtue where there are infinite obligations to excite 
and quicken it, he will be likely to want all others 
towards his fellow-creatures, whose utmost gifts are 
poor compared to those he daily receives at the hands 
of his never-failing Almighty Friend. ^Remember 
thy Creator in the days of thy youth^ is big with the 

deepest wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the begin- 

7 



8 DANGERS AND DUTIES 

ning of wisdom and an upright heart, — that is, under- 
standing. Tliis is eternally true, whether the wits and 
rakes of Cambridge allow it or not. Hold fast, there- 
fore, by this sheet-anchor of hapj)iness, religion ; you 
will often want it in the times of most danger, — the 
storms and tempests of life. Cherish true religion.^' 

This advice of the old statesman and orator may 
well be poured into the ears of the young men who 
are coming up to manhood now. If it was necessary 
in the case of a young man studying at Cambridge, 
where religion had especially enthroned itself, where 
the air upon the Cam was laden with the prayers of 
generations of believing souls; where splendid colleges, 
bearing the marks of many centuries, were at once the 
monuments and defenders of the religious idea ; where 
infidelity confronted the acutest intellects, how neces- 
sary is it, in our day and Nation, for the young man 
whose ears are assailed with the many sounding voices 
of sneering scepticism, and whose studies are not 
directed into the evidences and foundations of religious 
truth ! The great majority of the young men of our 
day who array themselves in the ranks of open or 
covert infidelity, who regard religion as a perishing 
legacy of the dark and superstitious age of the human 
race, would be at a loss to give any reasons for their 
scepticism, or against Christianity. They have been 
captured by a sound. A thousand theories, inconsist- 
ent with each other, advanced with confidence against 
the religious convictions of mankind, have, in their 
minds, taken shape and form as demonstrated truths. 
Bubbles of systems which a breath unmakes, as a 



UNREASONING SCEPTICISM. 9 

breath made them, affect the young mind more than 
massive structures of thought, whose foundations are 
laid in the postulates of the human intellect, whose 
spires were lifted to theil* place by the vaulting genius 
of earth^s greatest thinkers, and whose walls have stood 
like adamant against the streams that have dissolved 
and scattered all other creations of the mind. The 
philosopher whose motto was, '' By doubting we learn,^' 
sought a middle way between a shallow empiricism 
and a shallow bigotry. His doubts were means, ave- 
nues to the great end he sought, — truth. He could 
not as a reasonable being inherit a system of thought 
as he inherited an estate. He must make his creed 
his own by mastering the evidences which made it his 
ancestors', and he could not master them but by ques- 
tioning them. But to rest in doubt to arrive finally at 
a mere negation, to doubt in order that he might doubt, 
was to reverse his system. His mind must have some 
system of thought, and a system of thought must be 
made of affirmatives, not negatives. How is it with 
the young minds that are turning away from religion 
to-day ? How is it with the leaders of the sceptical 
thought of the day? Do they agree in what they 
believe, or only in what they deny? Who can formu- 
late a creed in which even a few of the many sceptical 
schools can unite? What are the assured principles 
of infidelity ? The very word is a negation. We 
hear constantly of what is not believed. Let us hear 
some one begin with a credo. And yet from all the 
antagonistic camps of speculative and scientific infidelity 
which can never join forces, there arise whispers in the 



10 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

young ear that everything which mankind has held 
sacred is but a myth ; that what it lias believed is built 
on shadows; that its wisdom is withering folly, and 
its postulates unscientific error. In this critical phase 
of human development; when an arrogant generation 
is divorcing itself from the teachings of the generations 
that stretch back behind it; when the doctrines of 
Free-love are crashing against the foundations of the 
family ; when Socialism is surging up against the 
bulwarks of the State; when Communism is raising 
its red hand against the vested rights of property 
earned by labor; when science is ciphering God out 
of the universe, and pouring corrosive acids upon the 
sweetest hopes which inspired our ancestors^ lives; 
when the Athenian-like cry is heard morning and 
evening for something new, — it is a sad feature that 
the great cities have vastly multiplied the avenues to 
vice and immorality, to that laxity of practice which 
infallibly follows a laxity of thought. To lose the 
safeguards of religion is at any time dangerous. To 
lose the safeguards of religion, and, at the same time, 
encounter the most brilliant and organized forces of 
alluring evil, is sure to end in disaster. But that is 
the position in which the youth of this great city are 
already, or into which they are rapidly drifting. Bril- 
liant lectures have impressed upon them that the God 
whom their fathers worshipped is but a lingering 
shadow from the ghost-land of an ignorant age ; that 
the eternal justice before which Bacon trembled, Locke 
stood in awe, and Newton humbled himself, as the sure 
adjuster of the moral inequalities of human life, and 



UNREASONING SCEPTICISM, H 

the punisher of sins unpunished and triumphant here, 
is but a nightmare, from which this age is awakening. 
Leaders of sceptical science have told them in fascinat- 
ing English that every form of crime and vice is but a 
disease ; that drunkenness, adultery, theft, like catalepsy 
or fever, entitle them to the sympathy of humanity as 
the irresponsible victims of disease. The conscience 
has been demonstrated to be but an evolved function 
from the lowest forms of organic life, and its terrors 
removed by showing how easily environment and fear 
will educate. The finger of God has been lifted from 
the origin of life, which is now found in a fire-mist or 
protoplasm. The immortality of the soul, which before 
Christ was clear to Socrates and Plato and scarcely 
doubtful to Cicero; which after Christ was a demon- 
strated fact to the keenest intellects ever given to the 
children of men ; which was believed alike by Pascal 
and Voltaire, by Bishop Butler and Edward Gibbon, 
by Shaftesbury and Boyle, which has been seriously 
questioned by no eminent specialist, is now pronounced 
to be in doubt because the microscope and retort have 
not been able to corroborate the revelation of God, the 
instincts of the soul, and the common agreement of 
mankind. The belief of the ages is just reversed. The 
human soul, instead of having a beginning in time, and 
passing on to an eternal life in the future, is declared 
to be a product of an eternity in the past, and to be 
passing on to an extinction with the grave. The soul is 
but a form or function of matter. Thoughts are merely 
secretions from the brain. Emotions are only the 
vibrations of nerves. Modesty, virtue, piety, these are 



12 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

only so mucli beef and mutton. A man's moral and 
religious nature is just as much the product of his food 
as are his muscles and his brain, and there is nothing 
so absurd, we are told, as to preach a religion or a 
moral system to men who doubt it. This is the system 
of thought which is permeating society now. This is 
the freedom and liberality w^hich is offered to a boy or 
girl in the place of the old system which brought them 
up in the fear of the Lord, to obey their parents and 
civil rulers, and to regard this life as but the beginning 
of one w^hich should always wear the phase and keep 
the trend here given it. This is the system stamping 
out reverence for past and future, discarding all sanc- 
tions of ethics and religion, abandoning all inspirations 
which can lift man above his earth, — this is the system 
which our children are taught. And together with it, 
as if this infidelity in creed were not enough, infidelity 
in practice opens its pits and sets its traps along the 
streets and in the by-ways of these great cities where we 
live. Who has a child to-day and is careless of the 
influences which surround him? Who that has a son 
in Cincinnati can contemplate with ease and pleasure 
the environment of his life ? It is only the few who 
read and understand the great questions of religion 
and science. Not one person in ten thousand knows 
what the differences are supposed to be between Moses 
and modern science. Not one in ten thousand knows 
the evidences of Christianity, or the arguments by 
which scepticism attacks it. But so subtle is the in- 
fluence of doubt that a whisper of infidelity will drown 
the loudest tones of conviction. What the great mass 



UNREASONING SCEPTICISM. 13 

of people do know thoroughly is that old truths are 
questioned, old systems attacked, the Bible sneered at 
by men of learning greater than their own, and many, 
especially young men and boys, rush precipitately over 
the chasms where even sceptical science halts, and find 
themselves far in advance of their leaders. To doubt 
is easy, to prove is a work of time. He who shall hear 
some one deny the fact of the resurrection of Jesus from 
the grave, on which Christianity is based, may have his 
faith shaken in half an hour. But to convince him 
again will require long and patient work, going through 
the Scriptures, the evidences of their genuineness, of 
their authenticity, and of their credibility, and the con- 
viction may not be made until the very axioms and 
postulates of thought have been reached. Your boy 
hears some superficial speaker affirm confidently that 
there are gross errors and inconsistencies in the Scrip- 
tures. Will he be ready and willing to test the question 
by critical study and by analyzing the evidences on 
which critical scholarship rests itself? Conviction is 
a plant of slow growth. Doubt is the Jonah's gourd 
which springs up in a night. The system of Chris- 
tianity is linked together by a million arguments. 
Over its evidence the mind moves with a snaiFs pace, 
because it must test the soundness of every ring by all 
the laws of thought and evidence. But scepticism 
may suggest more doubts in one minute than the acutest 
intellect can answer, and the effect upon superficial 
minds is to leave the victory with the shallow but 
unanswered doubt. So doubt spreads like a mist, and 
thin and unsubstantial as it is, it obscures and hides 

2 



14 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

the splendid and solid fabric which reason has slowly 
reared. 

So it is that country-grocery infidels are noisy and 
certain where brilliant and scholarly and earnest scep- 
tical leaders are timid and drawing back. AVhile 
Huxley is declaring in so many words that there is not 
the slightest scintilla of proof that life has ever been 
produced by spontaneous generation, that old dictum 
of Bastian and Pasteur is still in the mouth of noisy 
shallowness, unsettling the faith of men in a Creator 
and a God. While Agassiz, and Dana, and Virchow, 
and Le Conte, and Dawson are all protesting against 
the theories of some scientists as factless and proofless, 
there are not lacking those who scatter them up and 
down the earth as solemn and accredited truths, bear- 
ing the imprimatur of that strange but potent name 
of science, and rob unthinking men of their faith and 
peace by a still-born theory. All the promptings of 
human nature are favorable to a system which removes 
the yoke from appetites and passions and paralyzes the 
fear of punishment for acts which are pleasant and for 
lives which are licentious. Men eagerly credit that 
which they wish to believe, and it is one of the strong- 
est evidences of Christ's religion that it has been able 
for so long a time to restrain the passions and control 
the lives of so many turbulent and passionate souls, 
and the slightest doubt as to its divinity is quickly 
reinforced by the desire to throw off the restraints 
which it has imposed upon the indulgence of our 
basilar instincts and appetites. In the middle of the 
seventeenth century the metaphysical infidelity of 



UNREASONING SCEPTICISM. 15 

Hobbes accomplished just what the scientific infidelity 
of our day is accomplishing. " Thousands who were 
incompetent to appreciate what was really valuable in 
his metaphysical speculations eagerly welcomed a theory 
which relaxed the obligations of morality and degraded 
religion into a mere affair of State. Hobbism soon 
became an almost essential part of the character of the 
fine gentleman. All the lighter kinds of literature 
were deeply tainted by the prevailing licentiousness. 
Poetry stooped to be the pander of every low desire. 
Ridicule, instead of putting guilt and error to the 
blush, turned her formidable shafts against innocence 
and truth. Men flew to frivolous amusements and to 
criminal pleasures with the greediness of long-enforced 
abstinence." 

The history of mankind shows that the eras of 
irreligion have been also the eras of marked immorality. 
When the religious obligation has been the most bind- 
ing the race has been the purest and most orderly. 
Gibbon has painted in glowing colors the fearful im- 
morality of Rome under Augustus, when mankind was 
at the last gasp of its religious life. The Augustan 
Age was the age of creedless infidelity wedded to 
diabolic immorality. The epoch of Louis Quatorze 
in France and the Restoration in England marks at 
once the spring-tide of infidelity and the lowest ebb 
of morality. However much we may shrink from the 
rigorous and tyrannical days of the Puritan Common- 
wealth in England and Calvin^s Republic in Geneva, 
the fact remains that even with such awful perversions 
of the religious idea, the moral condition of the people 



IG DANGERS AND DUTIES 

was exceptionally pure and liealtliy. Mark these facts, 
that when religion has been the dominant force in civil 
convulsions, even when that religion has worn its most 
repulsive garb, there morality has been best preserved ; 
and where infidelity has been dominant, even in so 
winning a garb as Cicero's eloquence, or Hume's pure 
life, there men have lost control of their passions and 
plunged into vice immoderately. 

But I ask any of you who have been carried away 
by the clamor of modern infidelity, to examine the 
reasons by which you have been influenced. Any 
young man who firmly believes that the props and 
supports of revelation have been knocked away, would 
better examine this matter. On what single angle has 
the Bible been satisfactorily attacked ? What position 
of sceptical thought, philosophical, critical, or scientific, 
has been so established as to gain the consent, I will 
not say of theologians, but of sceptics themselves? 
Where shall we seek the chair of science from which 
her voice is infallible and ex cathedra f For no sooner 
does one eminent sceptic promulgate a new discovery 
than we hear his condemnation from another eminent 
sceptic. The death-struggle of religion is ever immi- 
nent and ever deferred. No sooner does she turn to 
salute the great chief, whose inverted thumb shall be 
her death-signal ; no sooner does she speak to him, 
moritura te saluto, than fifty rival Caesars spring up to 
mortal contest with each other, and resigned religion 
alone survives. 

But then you say, has not science very clearly shown 



UNREASONING SCEPTICISM. yj 

that the Bible is in error in its statements as to physical 
facts and laws ? Has it not destroyed the Bible's claim 
to inspiration by its discoveries in geology^ astronomy, 
chemistry, philology, physiology, and the genesis of 
matter? Has not the first chapter of Genesis been 
completely demolished ? 

The answer to all such questions is the very simple 
one that the results of science are in no sense of the 
word to be relied on as final results. What it declares 
to be certain to-day it had not reached yesterday, and 
will doubt to-morrow. The history of scientific thought 
has been in the nature of things one of constant change, 
of climbing, where each rung of the ladder has been in 
turn exultingly grasped and quietly abandoned. But 
there is no more reason to believe that the present posi- 
tions of scientific thought will be permanent than there 
has been in the past. She speaks no more confidently 
now than she has spoken a hundred times before upon 
propositions which she has abandoned. So rapidly has 
she changed her utterances that at times the second 
edition of a work has contradicted the first. It is not 
remarkable that it should be so, but it destroys all 
claim to absolute reliability in any theory now made 
upon the same kind of evidence which then misled her. 
Compare her utterances as to anatomy. Galen,Vesalius, 
Harvey, Carpenter have each in turn announced his 
predecessor to be in error in the fundamentals of his 
science. And yet each represented in his day the high- 
est development of the knowledge in that branch of 
physical science. May not a day come when the pres- 
ent leaders of thought in anatomy shall be regarded 

b 2^ 



18 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

with the same compassion that is now extended to 
Vesalius and his tlieory as to the blood? Is there not 
room in this great science for as much advance in knowl- 
edge as that which separates the crude theories of Galen 
from the theories of to-day ? If this science, then, should 
arrogantly declare that it has overthrown in any way 
the statements of a revelation which has a prescriptive 
lien upon our trust, it is enough to say your system, 
not being self-evident nor a demonstration, nor by your 
own confession final and certain, may be in fundamental 
points opposed to facts which science shall yet unveil. 

It is almost in our own generation that the most re- 
markable developments of this great science have taken 
place. It cannot but be gratifying to any man who is 
interested in the progress of human knowledge to notice 
the vast contributions which our age has made to the 
store of anatomical knowledge. The microscope has 
opened new realms and made vast changes. In 1830, 
Miiller first wrote upon the gland structures. In 1833, 
Kiernan made the anatomy of the liver. Since then 
"Virchow and Lionel Beale have discovered the marvel- 
lous facts as to the cells and their surrounding matter. 
Bichat, and Haeckel, and Bischoff, and St. Hilaire, and 
Ehrenberg, and Huxley are men of to-day. 

Who can say what another generation may see if the 
powers of microscopy shall be increased ? Who can 
affirm that the science of anatomy shall not some day 
consider these the days of its swaddling-clothes and 
narrowness of vision ? As it is in anatomy, so it is in 
all the scientific theories as to the origin of life. The 
Bible plainly declares that organic life began on the 



UNREASONING SCEPTICISM. 19 

earth by a creative act of God. It does not say how. 
It does not say by what process. Whether by evolution 
through long ages of time or instantly^ it does not de- 
clare. But the mighty chasm between matter dead and 
matter living it declares to have been spanned by the 
act of God. Has science successfully attacked that 
position ? Are the results of her investigations reliable 
when they deny that proposition ? It has been denied 
by eminent scientists after careful investigation. Even 
Tyndall once thought he had discovered spontaneous 
generation of life^ and declared that he found in matter 
the promise and potency of all terrestrial life. But 
Professor Huxley, in the ^^ Encyclopaedia Britannica/^ 
says : 

" Not only is the kind of evidence adduced in favor 
of abiogenesis logically insufficient to furnish proof of 
its occurrence, but it may be stated as a well-based de- 
duction that the more careful the investigator and the 
more complete his mastery over the endless practical 
difficulties which surround experimentation on this sub- 
ject, the more certain are his experiments to give a 
negative result, while positive results are no less sure to 
crown the efforts of the clumsy and careless.^^ " The 
fact is, that at the present moment there is not a shadow 
of trustworthy direct evidence that abiogenesis does take 
place or has taken place within the period during which 
the existence of life on the globe is recorded.^^ 

What is this but to affirm in terms that the statement 
of Genesis has not been overthrown ? The " theologic 
conception'^ stands as the only clear solution of the be- 
ginning of the ^' chain of causal connections/^ What 



20 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

Harvey said Huxley says. Tyndall, fresh from his 
experiments on the Alps, says, '^ Omne vivum ex ovo^^ 
(everything living is from a living germ), but whence 
the germ derived its life science cannot even guess, and 
the Bible directly affirms. " Of the causes which have 
led to the organization of living matter it may be said 
that we know absolutely nothing.'^ That is Huxley. 
And God said, ^^ Let the earth bring forth grass, the 
herb yield seed, whose seed (life-germ) is in itself, and 
it was so.'^ That is the Bible statement, written before 
Biology began to collate facts or to rank as a science. 
I beg you to observe the use and meaning of the word 
" experimentation'^ by scientists, and to observe also the 
admission made by Huxley of the untrustworthy nature 
of much that passes under the name of exact science. 
Pasteur and Bastian were just as sure they had infal- 
libly discovered the origin of life by spontaneous gen- 
eration as Huxley and Tyndall are that they did not so 
discover it, and yet the experiments by all were of the 
same kind. Even now Haeckel stands by the doctrine 
of matter developing life. So that in this great question, 
striking at the fundamentals of all religion, there is no 
trust to be placed in the present dicta of science as 
against the faith in a living and creating God. 

Not only because of the shifting and contradictory 
phases of what are called results of science are they un- 
trustworthy, but also because all these results are arrived 
at by the use of instruments, which are of necessity in- 
exact, and by the use of senses, which are deceptive. 
The facts on which great systems are raised are observed 



UNREASONING SCEPTICISM. 21 

by the eye^ which may or may not correctly transmit 
the image. The measuring-rod is not and cannot be 
demonstrably accurate. The plumb-line is aifected by 
irregular masses of matter. Chemistry is subject to a 
thousand slight and unseen conditions in the purity of 
its elements and the presence of extraneous qualities. 
The microscope, magnifying a thousand diameters, 
shows how inaccurate was the judgment of the naked 
eye. A microscope often thousand diameters may show 
how inaccurate is the judgment of the present micro- 
scopists. Back of every investigation, however careful, 
there always lies the human sense which registers it, 
and that sense is in the highest degree prone to error. 
The eyes which science uses in her researches are the 
human eyes, whose testimony she discredits when they 
saw Christ risen from the dead. The same senses 
which science declares enough to establish the marvels 
of rat-like horses and gigantic lizards, entirely foreign 
to all human experience, are the senses whose testimony 
she will not hear when they speak of Christ^s marvel- 
lous acts, recorded by human experience. Every result 
in geology, paleontology, chemistry, in physics univer- 
sally, must be arrived at only through the faith of the 
investigator in the accuracy of his senses. Underneath 
the whole fabric which science is building there lies the 
same necessary corner-stone which supports religion, — 
Faith. The Christian is a Christian because he believes, 
has faith in the word of God, and that faith is based 
on the only kind of evidence which could support it, — 
the evidence of the senses of those who recorded it. 
The scientist believes in his theory because his senses 



22 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

liave made it sure to him and he has faith, believes, in 
the accuracy of the senses. The verifications of science 
depend on the infallibility of the senses and the abso- 
lute accuracy of the instruments used, and in no case 
can they be assured, and in every case they may be par- 
tially questioned. 

* * * * * * 

Not only does each successive age contradict or at 
least depart from the statements of the last, but at no 
one time do contemporaneous scientists agree upon im- 
portant and crucial questions. There is not a greater 
chasm between La Marck and Darwin than between 
Darwin and Agassiz. Lyell did not differ more from 
Dawson or Le Conte than Lyell differed from Lyell, or 
Dawson and Le Conte differ from the school of materi- 
alists of to-day. 

School stands opposed to school. Those great ques- 
tions upon which the Bible has spoken once, such as the 
existence of God, the origin of life, the difference be- 
tween matter and spirit, are wrangled over and disputed 
upon by men who speak arrogantly as to the overthrow 
of the Bible's testimony, and yet cannot agree among 
themselves. The Genesis declares, or seems to declare, 
that the human race sprung from a single pair. " No,'' 
said Agassiz, '' there were five or seven pair in five or 
seven different centres." '' No," says Charles Darwin, 
" there was a single ulterior material germ which 
evolved the race." So Darwin and his school make 
things converge to a unit. Agassiz and his school 
multiply the sources. Tyndall and Haeckel differ as 
much about the origin of life as Genesis does from 



Ul^REASONING SCEPTICISM, 23 

either. The believer in the Mosaic cosmogony finds 
the " Popular Science Monthly'' like the Temple of 
Janus, with its two faces, frowning and warlike or 
smiling and peaceful, depending upon where he enters 
it, at the first article or at the last. Where does the 
infallibility of this infallible body reside ? Marvellous 
have been the discoveries. Magnificent successes have 
been attained. The work of Leverrier going on in 
Paris, and the work of Adam going on in Cambridge, 
each resulting in the announcement simultaneously that 
a new planet must be just where the telescope showed 
Neptune to be, was a gigantic effort of the human mind. 
But by the side of such splendid achievements place 
the divergent theories as to comets, as to celestial 
measurements, as to nebulse, as to stellar substances, as 
to the influence of approaching and receding bodies, 
and it will be clear that there is as much difference of 
opinion here and as much to be doubtful of as there 
was of La Place's hypothesis. There is no branch of 
physical science where the results are so clear and in- 
disputable as to unite all the specialists upon it. And 
this is not saying but that tremendous strides have been 
made in scientific knowledge. The errors have been 
made when theorizing has begun. The theory of evo- 
lution may be true, and, if it were true, does not neces- 
sarily come into conflict with the Mosaic cosmogony, 
life being postulated ; but it must not be forgotten that 
it is but a theory, ^ It has not the facts to make it a 
system. Agassiz and many others have pointed out 
great gaps in the chain, which cannot be filled by any 
known facts, even supposing the theory to be true else- 



24 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

where. The facts which science has discovered are one 
thing, and the tlieories and inductions from them quite 
another ; and it is worth remembering that the most 
prominent thoughts of the stars and of the terrestrial 
forms of matter which science has enounced are called 
respectively a hypothesis and a theory. 

I wish I might go on to discuss this subject through 
other channels, to show what ethnology and philology 
have done to corroborate scriptural statements ; to show 
what critical scholarship has done in establishing the 
genuineness of the Biblical records ; to show what 
archaeology has done in removing apparent errors in the 
Old Testament and New Testament histories ; to show 
how a million forces have been toiling, raising up a new 
continent of facts to support the Bible, as the coral 
continents shake the seas from oflF their rising shoulders. 
But if I have accomplished one purpose, I am satisfied. 
If I have shown you that there is such a thing as a 
crude and unripe scepticism, if I have shown you that 
so far as scientific facts have been determined even by 
fallible means and agents there is nothing to invalidate 
the claims of Scripture to be the word of God, I am 
satisfied. What science may do no man can say. 
More hopeful than her esoteric disciples, who claim 
perfection and infallibility for her present utterances, I 
anticipate for her magnificent conquests yet to come. 
Pizarro-like, Cortez-like, I believe she will go forth to 
gather glory and victory in realms yet undiscovered. 
I will not limit her except as matter limits her. And 
M'hen she stands at last upon the final verge of matter, 
at the edge of the mighty chasm which yawns between 



UNREASONING SCEPTICISM. 25 

matter and mind, she will find the living Power which 
moves all matter eludes her analysis ; she will find, as 
Professor Tyndall said in his Belfast address, that '' as 
little as in the days of Job can man by searching find 
this power out/^ Be sure if you weaver in your faith 
that it be upon good and convincing evidence. Be not 
sceptical as to the truths by which a hundred genera- 
tions of your ancestors have lived and died merely be- 
cause it is the fashion to be sceptical. To be a Christian 
merely because your father was is mental slavery. 
There is only one lower circle of degradation for the 
mind, it is to be a sceptic because you hear that others 
are. Read and study for yourself. Go about Jerusalem, 
mark well her bulwarks, tell all her towers. Test your 
faith by every standard, and whatever it may make you 
in religious convictions, it will make you a larger and 
nobler character. What you have will at least be your 
own, and the sling of David is better for him than the 
armor of Saul. But properly conducted, your studies 
will lead you to a firmer rest than ever upon the word 
of God. Professor Dana has been an honored lifetime 
in his studies, and his words are not discouraging : 

"The grand old Book of God still stands, and this 
old earth, the more its leaves are turned over and pon- 
dered, the more it will sustain and illustrate the sacred 
word.^^ 

Sir John Herschel was not a superficial thinker, and 
he says, " All human discoveries seem to be made only 
for the purpose of confirming more and more strongly 
the truths contained in the sacred Scriptures.'^ Sir 
Isaac Newton may be safely trusted to know something 



26 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

of science and philosophy. He says, " I account tlie 
Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy/' 
You cannot follow Goethe into the secret dwelling- 
places of his genius, but you may follow the guide 
which led him in his life : " It is a belief in the Bible 
which has served me as a guide of my moral and liter- 
ary life/' The spirit of Christianity is not narrow. 
It does not muzzle the intellect. To stifle thought is 
in her eye parricide, for she herself is the child of 
thought. Perhaps after all there is no grander motto 
that the human mind could place over the portal of the 
temple of truth, where all alike seek to enter, than the 
words of St. Paul : " Prove all thins^s. Hold fast that 
which is true.'' 



THE GENUINENESS AND AUTHORITY OF THE 
NEW TESTAMENT. 

Correct thought lies behind correct practice, and 
the wide-spread doubts as to old standards of belief 
must be removed, especially from young minds which 
have unconsciously imbibed them and are gradually 
allowing them to become convictions by right of 
occupancy. 

The very first duty of the pulpit is to teach the 
doctrine and set forth the life of Jesus Christ. When 
I come to you with these doctrines and with this life 
you ask, "How do you know Jesus ever taught or did 
any such things as you say he did V^ The reply must 
be, " The New Testament, especially the Gospel, de- 
clares that he did." Again, you say, "How do you 
know that these books were written by the persons and 
at the time generally supposed, or that these writers 
were competent witnesses to the facts spoken of by 
them?" These are legitimate and proper questions, 
and I shall try to answer them. But you must observe 
that the presumption is very largely on the side of 
those who affirm the authenticity and genuineness of 
the New Testament. The current belief of so many 
centuries, that John wrote the Gospel attributed to 
him and Paul the Epistles ascribed to him, makes a 
strong presumption in favor of their authorship. 

27 



28 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

Moreover, some of the books bear the name of, and 
claim to be written by, certain men, to whom such 
books liave been consequently attributed. To deny 
such authorship now is to raise the charge of motive- 
less forgery, which must require overwhelming affirma- 
tive proof. Apply this proposition to other books. 
There has been a suspicion many times expressed as to 
Shakspeare's works. Books have been written to con- 
vince the world that the plays ascribed to him by popu- 
lar tradition were really written by some one else. But 
the claim of Shakspeare, entirely unsupported except by 
tradition, has stood against all such attempts, because 
mankind will not reverse a long-settled judgment, even 
when the facts on which that judgment were based have 
perished, unless direct and irrefutable testimony is ad- 
duced to show that claim to be false. The unbroken con- 
viction of fifty generations as to a matter of fact is no 
slight support. And if in each of these generations 
there have been a few who expressed a doubt, the general 
agreement in the face of such doubts enhances the 
value of the testimony. Strange as such a proposition 
may seem, it is nevertheless true that the existence of a 
few doubters as to a fact in any generation strength- 
ens, not weakens, the proof of that fact. For general 
agreement may be only the result of indifference or 
ignorance. But when the great mass of a community 
unhesitatingly believe a fact against the arguments and 
doubts of a few, such conviction takes the form of a 
judgment made on evidence offered. The doubts of 
Thomas have made the faith of the Church. His 
doubts, overruled by evidence, have made the same 



GENUINENESS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 29 

kind of doubts unreasonable now. That the Church 
so generally dismissed these .objections when made in 
the third century^ that every succeeding generation has 
with equal firmness dismissed them, that her judgment 
has been continually appealed to and continually con- 
sistent, is to raise so strong a presumption that she is 
right that nothing but new testimony of a direct and 
overwhelming character can destroy it. The entire 
fabric of English common law, the unwritten Consti- 
tution of England, has derived its authority from the 
consent of generation after generation. But the records 
of the courts show how in each generation there have 
been those who have challenged it. At the very be- 
ginning of any such lecture as this upon the evidences 
of the New Testament it is of vast importance to show 
that the burden of proof lies heavily upon the denier 
of the common and traditional belief. 

If every particle of direct proof which made the 
early Church believe that St. Luke wrote the Acts and 
the third Gospel, and that Paul wrote the great letters 
to Rome and Corinth and Galatia, were perished, and 
were no longer accessible, if there were absolutely 
nothing of any kind except tradition to show that the 
New Testament books were written by the authors to 
whom the Church has ascribed them, even then I beg 
you to observe that that tradition alone, unsupported, 
would crush all speculative scepticism, would stand 
against everything but the same kind of direct evidence 
as that on which itself is reared. 

Has such testimony been produced as to destroy the 

inherited belief of the ages that the New Testament 

3* 



30 DANGERS AND DUTIES 

is an authentic and genuine record of the life and 
teachings of Jesus ? 

Has modern criticism been able to deny the state- 
ments of these writers that they were eye-witnesses of 
tlie facts they record ? Some time ago I met a young 
man who had been affected by the vague and uncertain 
claims of sceptical criticism. Highly intelligent, a 
thinker for himself, he had nevertheless allowed him- 
self to believe that the reiterated statements as to the 
doubtful origin of the Gospels w^ere based on sufficient 
evidence. It had unsettled all his convictions. When 
I referred him to any Gospel for the teachings of the 
Master, his answer was, Luke, or Mark, or John, or 
Matthew, may have been witnesses of the life of Jesus, 
but the books bearing their name were not written 
until nearly two hundred years after Christ, and con- 
sequently they are entirely unreliable. 

He had not studied the matter for himself, but there 
were not lacking authorities in which such statements 
might be found, and plenty of plausible reasons to 
support them. 

Had he taken time to thoroughly post himself he 
would have found that the great literary criticism of 
to-day will not hear of any such statement as he made, 
and as one frequently hears. The German schools, 
especially the Tubingen school, are entirely unworthy 
of credit in criticism, because they assume as a postulate 
that any record of a miraculous event is to be rejected. 
Of course the Gospels fall under their ban, and they 
begin their criticism by throwing out the whole history 
as mythical or fraudulent. With such an unphilo- 



GENUINENESS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 31 

sophlcal a priori principle, there can be no other 
result. Criticism is killed before its functions begin 
to work. Such thinkers do not at all rely upon the 
external evidence as to the genuineness of these books. 
They do not at all go into the only question with 
which literary criticism has anything to do ; that is, 
whether these books are proved by sound testimony to 
be the work of those whose name they bear, and con- 
sequently of eye-witnesses of what they record. Not at 
all. But the one internal fact that they tell of miracles 
is enough to prove that they are either post-apostolic 
forgeries or fraudulent and lying stories written to 
advance some theological tendencies in the early 
Christian body. 

But not only is the presumption in favor of the 
genuineness of the Gospel very strong, not only is the 
evidence against that genuineness unphilosophical, un- 
critical, and dreamy in its nature, but the direct evi- 
dence which establishes it is overwhelming. We are 
apt to forget how slight is the evidence on which any 
past event rests. Archbishop Whately, following the 
logic which sceptical criticism uses to break down 
belief in the life of Christ recorded in the Gospels, took 
the far more recent life of Napoleon Bonaparte, whom 
living men had seen, and made it very clear that his 
history was a tissue of lies and gross improbabilities, 
that no such man ever lived, and that the evidence 
in support of it w^as contradictory and incredible. 
Whately 's ^^ Historical Doubts as to Bonaparte^^ deals 
as fairly with human testimony as Strauss's '' Life of 
Jesus^^ or Eichhorn^s '' Introduction to the New Testa- 



32 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

ment/^ and Whately is far subtler than either in his 
analysis of the evidence offered. But no one really 
doubts tliat Napoleon did live and did those marvellous 
things tliat are recorded of him, and Whately selected 
his life because there was no man in eighteen centuries 
who had been so universally known and written about, 
and because the methods of sceptical criticism which 
were applied to Jesus and the Gospels would resolve 
even Napoleon into a myth. There is no such testi- 
mony to the life of Caesar as to that of Jesus Christ. 
There is not as much evidence altogether upon the 
habitable globe that Tacitus wrote his history, or 
Michael Angelo painted the Last Judgment, as there 
is in a single library that St. Luke wrote the Acts of 
the Apostles and Paul wrote the Epistle to the Corin- 
thians. 

There are more and better manuscripts of the Gospels 
in one collection than there are of any classical writer 
altogether. The same kind of reasoning which unset- 
tles faith in the genuineness of the Gospels undermines 
the credibility of every past event, and we get to this at 
last, that nothing can convince us of what is not in our 
own personal experience. A man tells me that he saw 
Lee surrender. I deny it. He has no possible way to 
convince me. If I deny his own eye-witness there is 
nothing else to bring. He brings another man, a hun- 
dred men, to corroborate him. Every one testifies that 
Lee did surrender, but how can he make me believe 
it if I still declare that every one of them may be mis- 
taken or may be a liar ? A man tells me that there 
is such a country as China, with customs and people 



GENUINENESS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 33 

entirely the antipodes of ours. If I deny it, there is 
only one way to convince me, and that is to make 
China a part of my experience, to let me see it for 
myself. 

We must rely on human testimony, or close histories 
and courts and books. And the testimony as to the 
genuineness of the Gospels is in no sense of the word 
different from other human testimony, except that it is 
stronger than usual for events so long past. Now look 
at it: 

For all practical purposes we might as well place 
ourselves at the end of the second century after Christ 
to begin the subject. For, as the Gospels exist now 
indisputably, so they existed indisputably in the fif- 
teenth century, the tenth century, the fifth century, the 
second century. I go no farther back than that to 
begin, because it is just there that universal agreement 
as to their existence in present form ends. At the close 
of the second century you will notice there is no ques- 
tion whatever by any one that the four Gospels, Acts, 
and thirteen of PauFs Epistles were in existence in 
every part of the world, and unanimously received as 
sacred books by scattered churches from Spain to the 
Euphrates. You will remember that these were not 
all bound up together in one canon, as we have them, 
but each Gospel or Epistle constituted a roll of papy- 
rus, which was copied and recopied as the demand 
increased. It has been estimated from the agreeing 
statements of many historians that at this time, 200 
years A.c, the proportion of Christians in the Empire 
was about one in every twenty of the population, but if 



34 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

there were only one-lialf tliat number there would still 
be at least three millions of Christians then. There were 
others out of the Empire, and the energetic statements 
of Tertullian at this time compel us to think this esti- 
mate far too small. For instance, he says in one place, 
addressing the authorities of the Empire, "We are 
but of yesterday, and we have filled everything that is 
yours, — cities, islands, castles, free toAvns, council-halls, 
the very camps, all classes of men, the palace, the 
Senate, the forum. We can number your armies; 
there are more Christians in a single province.^^ Again 
he speaks of the Christians as " so great a multitude of 
men, almost the majority in every city.^^ And Pliny, 
the Roman Governor of Pontus, writing to Trajan, 
uses language indicating that the Christians were a 
numerous element in his jurisdiction. Such testimony 
warrants the supposition that there were at least one- 
fortieth of all the population of the Empire Christians. 
Seven thousand five hundred persons in a city like 
Cincinnati would at least be required to justify such 
claims as Tertullian uses, when the sect was as yet a 
persecuted one. But among these three millions of 
Christians it is very clear that the Gospels and Acts 
and Epistles were universally distributed. Every 
small gathering of them had their own copy and 
regarded it with the utmost reverence. Their w^orship 
everywhere consisted of prayer and reading the word 
of God. Remember this was about the year 200, when 
by universal agreement of all scholars our present Scrip- 
tures were the only ones in general use, and when they 
were regarded with the utmost reverence. Their cost 



GENUINENESS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 35 

was slight. Any one might buy a copy of a Gospel for 
an insignificant sum. When we hear what the copies 
of the contemporaneous writers cost we may believe 
that ten cents of our money would buy a copy of a 
Gospel. Martial's thirteenth book, containing two 
hundred and seventy-two verses, sold for seven cents 
a copy. It is certain that the multiplication of manu- 
scripts of the New Testament books was very great, 
and if every fifty Christians owned one copy, we should 
have the astonishingly large number of sixty thousand 
copies extant in the year 200 A.c. This is Norton's 
estimate, and I believe it to be too small by far. But 
t-ake it as the basis of our investigation, and remember 
how enormously successful any book is to-day which 
passes through sixty editions, and this fact assumes 
importance. How did all these copies come to agree 
with each other and be essentially the Scriptures of 
to-day ? From what original did so many copies of 
St. Luke's Gospel, or Book of Acts, bearing his 
name, scattered all over the world, come into gene- 
ral use within a century of the death of one of Christ's 
apostles ? How did the great number of copies of the 
Gospel of St. John receive the unanimous approbation 
of scattered Christians within the lifetime of those who 
remembered him alive ? The slow multiplication of 
books by the pen, as these early copies of the Gospels 
were multiplied, is vastly different from multiplying 
them through a press. That the Christians in Syria 
had the same Gospels as the Christians in Spain makes 
it necessary to look still farther back to the archetype, 
— the first copy from which each had taken a trans- 



36 DANGERS AND DUTIES 

cription, — and the fact that everywhere the Christians 
attributed their books to the same author is cumulative 
evidence that he was that author. Everywhere the 
third Gospel is called St. Luke's^ the first St. Matthew's. 
The Church was not yet an organized Catholic body 
in the second century. She had no general councils, 
no great meetings where she could unite her disciples 
upon a course of action. She was as yet a persecuted 
sect, and remained so for a century and a quarter. 
And yet everywhere, by Christians of every degree and 
locality, these books and these only were regarded as 
genuine and authentic. In the south of France lived 
Irensetis, who was born within forty years after the 
death of John, and he says " Matthew published a 
Gospel in Hebrew. Mark delivered to us in writing 
what Peter had preached, and Luke, the companion 
of Paul, recorded the Gospel preached by him. After- 
wards John, the disciple of the Lord, likewise pub- 
lished a Gospel while he dwelt in Ephesus in Asia ;'^ 
and in another passage he goes on to show why there 
should have been just four Gospels and no more. 
Theophilus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria and the 
infidel Celsus all give similar testimony as to the 
Scriptures then in use. But, as I said before, we need 
produce no testimony as to this point, for there is no 
critic who denies that before the close of the second 
century our present Gospel and most of the New 
Testament were universally received. It does not seem 
to need any argument to prove that these numerous 
scattered and agreeing copies of the sacred writings did 
not all spring up at once. Each copy was made from a 



GENUINENESS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 37 

former one, and so large a number demands a consider- 
able lapse of time. You must bear in mind that the 
Epistles of St. Paul were addressed originally to par- 
ticular bodies of Christians, and sent by hand to Rome 
and Corinth and the places severally addressed, and 
whether they were written by Paul himself or some 
forger, they must have spread from one original spot 
into all parts of the world. I do not dwell now upon 
the absurdity of supposing that the Christians in these 
different Churches were addressed by Paul long after 
Paul was dead, and exhorted and rebuked by one using 
the name of their founder, that they gave currency to 
such spurious letters, knowing them to be spurious, 
while they were filled with such severe denunciations 
of their immoralities and unchristian character. I only 
beg you to notice that much time must be allowed for 
all these copies to converge to their original. Suppose 
we say it took fifty years, although it is a physical im- 
possibility that so short a time would suffice. We will 
then have one copy of each book as it exists to-day, 
attributed to the same author as now, and received one 
hundred and fifty years after Christ as the especial 
authority, to be multiplied and copied to the exclusion 
of all others. For if there were others different from 
these, where are they ? Why were they not copied and 
spread abroad ? Why did their copies not rise up be- 
side the others to confuse the scattered Christians, and 
break up that unanimity which confessedly obtained at 
the close of the century ? But it so happens that in 
that dark second century of the Christian era, when 
there was no literary activity anywhere, when men 

4 



38 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

were not making records for the future, there was one 
man who lias written very prolifically, and he flourished 
just in the era we have reached, 150 A.c. Justin 
Martyr was raised in the pagan philosophies, and 
became a Christian. He spent much time in travel- 
ling, and saw Christians in all parts of the Empire. In 
his works he quotes over and over again from the 
sacred books. While he seems to use his memory in 
his references to the Scriptures as not particular to be 
exactly accurate when arguing against Jews and heathen, 
yet it is always easy to refer his words to the Gospels 
as we have them now. And as we have shown that 
the present Gospels must have been in existence in his 
time to account for their subsequent spread, and as it is 
impossible that there were others different and equally 
venerated by Christians, and yet never propagated, we 
are shut up to the conviction that the Gospels he used 
are those we use, and he refers them to the same authors. 
" The memoirs which I affirm to have been composed 
by Apostles of Christ and their companions,^^ he says. 
The terms by which we designate these lives of Jesus 
were not yet in common use. The word ^' Testament" 
was first used by Tertullian about 190. The word 
'^ Gospel" crept gradually into use, and Justin Martyr 
calls our Gospel " Memoirs," which they are. Now, 
see where we are. We are within fifty years of the 
death of St. John, and the only writings that have de- 
scended to us are filled with quotations and extracts from 
the books of the New Testament as we have them. 
So overwhelming is the proof of this that the fairest 
critics even of the Tubingen school admit that the Gos- 



GENUINENESS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 39 

pel of St. John, on which the fight is evSpecially made, was 
known to Justin about one hundred and fifty years after 
Christ. So says Keim, and so says Hilgenfeld. But if 
Justin Martyr used our present Gospel of St. John as 
an authentic writing of that apostle, when St. John had 
not been fifty years in his grave, when his pupils and 
converts were living by scores, when Justin had in 
Ephesus conversed with those who had been John^s 
companions, we have really traced that Gospel to St, 
John himself. Not that there are not also earlier 
references to it in Papius,and Ignatius, and Hippolytus 
as they are preserved to us from the very first of the 
century. But the Gospel of St. John is the one upon 
which the greatest doubt has been thrown. Renan 
denied its genuineness in one edition after having 
deliberately affirmed it in an earlier one. It is entirely 
inconceivable that a forgery should have been imposed 
on Christians within a very few years, as the last words 
of their great Apostle. There is far greater reason to 
suppose that the books attributed to Washington Irving 
or the speeches we think to have been made by Henry 
Clay were deft forgeries, perverting the real opinions 
of those men whom many still living have seen and 
heard. Such a parallel by no means expresses the un- 
likely nature of this theory of a later origin of the 
Gospel. For you must remember that the early Chris- 
tians clung to nothing on earth with the ardent affection 
which they had for their holy books. Long after this 
the bitterest charge which could be ^ made against a 
Christian was " traditor,^^ a surrenderer of the sacred 
books to the government. That crime forever separated 



40 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

him from the fellowship of the Church, and rather than 
betray the books the Christian went singing into the fires 
of Decius and Diocletian. When you cling to a book 
more than to your life it is probable you know some- 
thing about it. Men do not greedily accept forgeries 
and die rather than give them up. And when Justin 
Martyr died a martyr^s death, testifying, witnessing — 
for that is what martyrdom means — the genuineness 
and sanction of the Gospels, and did this within the 
lifetime of many who had seen Apostles, he gives the 
highest kind of evidence which circumstances can 
give. 

There is really very little doubt entertained now by 
any competent critics as to the genuineness of most of 
the New Testament books. As to the Gospels, Acts, 
and Pauline Epistles it may be said there is really none. 
The Acts of the Apostles is one of the best-attested 
books in literature. It does not claim to be the work 
of St. Luke, but the style, the former treatise spoken 
of, and above all the declaration that the author was a 
travelling companion with Paul, which we know Luke 
was, leave no doubt. Paley's ^' Horse Paulinse" are 
filled with the evidences of coincidences between the 
Acts and the Epistles, showing that none but an actual 
eye-witness of the events could have been so accurate, 
and that nothing but truth could establish so many un- 
designed coincidences between Paul and Luke. Late 
years have brought out in a w^onderful way some con- 
firmations of the'Se writers where sceptical criticism had 
long declared them in error. Let me in a few words 
mention one : 



GENUINENESS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 41 

The writer of the Acts calls the Governor of Cyprus 
a Pro-Consul. Now, it is well known that in the di- 
vision of the jurisdiction of the Empire between Augus- 
tus and the Senate, Cyprus was retained by Augustus for 
himself, and consequently his legate there would be not 
a Pro-Consul, as this writer calls him, but a Pro-Prae- 
tor. Hence this writer could not have been in Cyprus, 
as he says, and has unwittingly fallen into an error that 
shows later authorship. But Dio Cassius informs us 
that while Augustus did at first retain Cyprus, he sub- 
sequently exchanged it for another province, thus 
placing it again under the jurisdiction of the Senate; 
and we have a coin of the reign of Claudius bearing the 
image and name of a Cyprian Pro-Consul ; so that the 
seeming error is really a most valuable corroboration of 
the genuineness and authenticity of the writer. In the 
same way the latest explorations and soundings of the 
Mediterranean by the English Government throw a flood 
of light upon those chapters in the Acts in which Paul's 
voyage and shipwreck are so graphically and minutely 
described. No man, however ingenious, could invent 
such a chain of details, could so describe the actions of 
the winds, and cast the log of the ship, without violating 
the probabilities and facts of the laws of navigation. 
But what I want you to notice is that if the claim of 
St. Luke to the authorship of the Acts be allowed, — and 
it cannot be questioned, except by an uncritical a priori 
canon, — then it is just what is claimed in the beginning 
of it: the testimony of an eye-witness of the great 
events of the Gospel. This author declares, as an actual 

witness of the event, that Jesus rose from the dead ; 

4* 



42 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

that lie was seen of many afterwards through forty 
days ; that infallible proofs made it unquestionable and 
unquestioned; that this resurrection was commonly 
preached by the disciples and undenied by the Jews. 
From this Book of Acts most of the important facts in 
the Gospels may be drawn. The genuineness of the 
Acts proves the genuineness of the third Gospel, and 
without reference to any other books whatever. If the 
Pauline Epistles, the Acts, and the third Gospel be 
admitted genuine, there is enough to establish the great 
claims of Christianity to be based on evidence such as 
a court of justice could not refuse. But these books 
prove the others, and when I say that there is no real 
scholarship which denies the genuineness of the great 
books, I am perfectly aware of what I say. For I can- 
not call that critical scholarship which underlies the 
theories of De Wette, of Zeller, of Baur, and of the 
whole school of Tubingen, which makes facts conform 
to a canon involving the very matter in dispute. But 
even this school agrees upon no later date for the writ- 
ing of the Acts than twenty-five years after John^s 
death. The only theory which can possibly account for 
the belief of the early Christians as to their books, the 
only theory which can in any way explain the astonish- 
ing accuracy and agreement of these books, is the one 
which supposes them to be what they claim to be, and 
what they were supposed to be by all the witnesses 
whom we can call. And then there is one very impor- 
tant fact which must be borne in mind when we are 
looking for early references by Christians to their sacred 
books, and that is that during the life of the Apostles 



GENUINENESS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 43 

and their more eminent followers, oral teaching was 
common. The sacred writings would not acquire value 
while their authors were living. When St. Paul 
preached in Athens, in Rome, in Corinth, thirty years 
after Christ^s death, his oral teachings were just what 
our Bible is to us. When the last apostle and eye-wit- 
ness of Jesus was dead, then their written testimony, 
their memoirs and letters, would be circulated as the 
educators of the new Christians. The Pauline letters 
would not be of their present value while men could 
turn to Paul himself. The Church in Ephesus, a hun- 
dred years after Christ, would hang more upon the lips 
of the beloved John, their bishop, while he told them 
of the earthly life of Jesus, than upon the condensed 
written testimony of others, which must have been, 
however, in agreement with him. There are number- 
less diaries which future generations will use in making 
up the history of the late war, which we do not need, 
because we can get ampler details from those who wrote 
them. It is just so with the Christian books; when 
their testimony was needed, when the writers died, their 
memoirs began to be quoted, and spread, and reverenced. 
They bear internal evidences of genuineness, and it is 
absolutely proved by external evidence, except as against 
an a priori impossibility. I have barely touched the 
great mass of evidence, and yet I must stop. The early 
manuscripts, the early translators into different lan- 
guages, the quotations by the fathers, the testimony of 
heathen and heretic opponents, the current use of the 
books, the impossibility of their forgery or gross cor- 
ruption, the general and unquestioned tradition of their 



44 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

genuineness, tlieir own claims and circumstantial state- 
ments and agreements, all these together make up a 
stronger case for the genuineness and incorruption of 
the New Testament than for any other literary work 
in existence. Push aside the cloud of vague doubts 
and baseless theories and you will find that no books 
have been so searchingly investigated, and that the 
criticism which would reject them as untrustworthy and 
false would leave nothing certain in the literary world. 
If St. Luke must be thrown out, so must Tacitus, so 
must Erasmus, so must Hume. Human testimony 
supports them all. And the books of Tacitus would 
not stand a minute before the investigations to which 
St. Luke has been subjected. 

Let me finish this lecture by begging you to do me 
the credit to believe that I do not argue this question 
as a paid advocate. If I think it an important matter 
for you to settle, I think it equally important that my 
own mind and soul should be at rest in the truth. The 
argument which I have made must stand or fall by its 
own merits, but behind the argument there lies the 
mighty reservoir out of which the argument has flowed, 
the intense and unwavering faith of the man himself. 
That I defend the authority of the New Testament 
from this pulpit is because that authority drew me a 
free man into this pulpit. Clothed with my reason I 
could not refuse to accept these books for what they 
claim to be, when the evidences were studied. 

All the circumstantial evidence which juries, pro- 
verbially reluctant to take life, have thought enough to 
hang a man, may be found to establish the genuineness 



GENUINENESS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. 45 

of these books. It is proved beyond a reasonable 
doubt. The circumstances are such that even if direct 
testimony were wanting it is impossible to deny that 
John wrote his books, and Luke his. These circum- 
stances, when interpreted upon the supposition that the 
books are what they claim to be, are all consistent and 
explained. Upon any contrary supposition they are a 
bristling line of difficulties. Then the. direct evidence 
reaches to a demonstration. No one saw John write 
his Gospel that I know of, but such evidence is not to 
be expected, and cannot be found for one book in a 
million. But all the direct testimony there is points 
one way, and the only reason there is not more is that 
the fact was so unquestioned in the early ages that it 
was not thought necessary to establish it by proof. So 
I cannot but admit the genuineness of the books and 
receive them as contemporaneous history by living wit- 
nesses to the facts recorded. 

So they are lifted from the category of mythical 
legends condemned by Niebuhr. Myths are not born 
in a generation. They are the exaggerated wonders of 
long past ages. There is a mighty difference between 
the legends of Eomulus and Remus, of Camillus and 
Porsenna, of Coriolanus and the Horatii, first re- 
corded many years after the fact, and the history of 
Jesus and his Apostles, written by the Apostles them- 
selves. Of the latter we may say they cannot be re- 
fused acceptance on the score of competency. I say 
nothing now as to their inspiration and accuracy. Of 
the former may be said what Coleridge has made 
Schiller say : 



46 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

** The intelligible forms of ancient poets, 
The fair humanities of old religion, 
The power, the beauty, and the majesty 
That had their haunts in dale or piney mountain, 
Or forest, by slow stream or pebbly spring. 
Or chasms and watery depths, — all these have vanished ; 
They live no longer in the faith of Reason. '^ 

In the pure faith of reason we cling to the New 
Testament, and find an additional reason for our faith 
in the sweet story that it tells, the hopes that it kindles, 
the forgiveness it promises, the heaven it pictures, and 
the manhood it makes possible. 



POSSIBILITY AND FACT OF MIRACLES. 

You will remember that in the first lecture I tried 
to show you how untrustworthy and variant are the 
present theories of science when antagonistic to the 
Bible revelation, I was not so narrowed by my theo- 
logical training as to think that my view of God and 
the world must be right in every particular, and I do 
not offer to you any system of Bible interpretation as 
an unchangeable and perpetual truth. We grow in 
knowledge, and I am sure the time will come when 
men shall find grander truths in the Bible than those 
we reverence. Not opposed to those we now grasp, but 
spreading out and around them. As I think men who 
make God^s works their especial study shall go on into 
deeper beauties and into broader truths than those 
which science has yet reached, so it well may be with 
the students of God^s word, and future generations may 
see the sublimer proportions of truths which we see 
only in the shadows. My lecture was not to persuade 
you that I was infallible in finding out just what the 
Scriptures mean, but only to show you that its plain 
statements and teachings have not been faulted by any 
positive results of science, but that, on the contrary, 
its declarations are so strangely in agreement with 
those of the most recent investigators of natural science 
that its early statement of them can be accounted for 
only by the supposition of revelation. 

47 



48 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

In the second lecture I showed you that the testi- 
mony which supports the genuineness of the New Tes- 
tament books cannot be crushed. They are proved 
beyond a doubt to be the works of eye-witnesses of the 
events recorded. When St. Luke speaks of Christ's 
resurrection, he calls himself an eye-witness to that 
fact. When St. John writes that splendid narrative 
of the raising of Lazarus, so full of pathos, so grand in 
its simplicity, he records what he himself saw. 

We take a third and final step. For the objection 
now springs up : such a thing is impossible; a miracle 
cannot take place, and if it could, none ever has. The 
subject, then, to which I ask you to listen is the '' Pos- 
sibility and Fact of the New Testament Miracles.^' 

I. Take first the question. Is a miracle possible f 
Now, this is a question which has divided human 
reason for ages. Even so long ago as Cicero's days 
there was a mass of thought on either side, w^hich he 
gives us in his essay on Divination. In Augustine's 
days, four hundred years later, the same struggle is 
going on, and he says, " How is that against nature 
which is from the will of God, since the will of such a 
great Creator is what makes the nature of everything ?" 
{De Oivitate Dei) The entire system of modern in- 
fidelity on this subject has found a firmer footing on 
the speculations of Spinoza. To him may be referred 
the origin of those arguments which Hume has most 
skilfully used. 

Spinoza defined a miracle to be ^^any w^ork the 
natural cause of which we cannot explain after the 
example of anything else to which w^e are accustomed," 



POSSIBILITY AND FACT OF MIRACLES. 49 

and on that definition denied the fact and the possibility 
of a miracle, arguing that it would destroy the immu- 
tability of God. Hume and modern rationalists, while 
holding the same conclusion, do not emphasize the 
same reason as Spinoza, the overthrow of God's immu- 
tability, but seek other grounds. But when, in the 
history of this great question, one stops upon Spinoza's 
writings, it seems very clear that the two opinions 
which have been entertained in the past will continue 
to be entertained in the future; because there are just 
two ways of regarding things external to ourself, or, in 
other words, the universe. One class of minds always 
have regarded it, and always will regard it, as under 
the direct and constant control of God. Wh^n the 
stars move in their orbit it is God moving them. 
When the fly clings to the window-pane, it is God 
who keeps him there. Everything becomes a visible 
manifestation of a living God. He moves the clouds 
by His own laws ; He brings the storms as He will. 
The whole system of what we call Nature is only God 
working. With an infinite wisdom, and without hin- 
drances in physical force. He is to the universe what a 
man may be to a"t>usiness establishment. The rules 
which he makes are for his convenience, not for his 
control, and the rule which seemed wise yesterday may 
not be so to-day, and may not be so again to-morrow. 
This is the religious idea which makes God the living 
force and will behind the blind and dumb agents of 
the physical world. This is the view of the old Hebrew 
prophets, to whom whirlwind and earthquake, and sun- 

sliine and dew, Arcturus and his sons, Orion, and the 
c d 6 



50 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

Pleiades, the ant and the locust, the wild elements 
coursing over earth and sky and sea, are only the agents 
and messengers of God. To study science is to study 
God. It is to look through nature up to nature's God. 
And the other view is that which Spinoza took. The 
conception of mechanism in the universe becomes promi- 
nent. Everything is looked at as a part of a mighty 
machine which grinds and crashes on forever. Not a 
single atom can be lost or misplaced. When the stars 
move it is because the machinery turns them. When 
the fly crawls on the window-pane it is because the 
mechanism compels it by means of the vacuum in his 
little feet. The storm is one product of the flying 
wheels. Look behind it and you shall see another 
wheel turning it, and behind that another, and so on 
to the central force, the great motive power, which is, 
perhaps, an unseen sun. Now, to tell such a man of a 
miracle is to tell an absurdity. How can a great ma- 
chine, where every part hangs upon another and every 
wheel cogs into another, how can it have one wheel 
stopped or one belt taken oif even for a moment with- 
out stopping the w^hole or plunging it into a fearful 
state of self-destruction? The conception of a govern- 
ing will-power is obscured or lost, and in its place there 
is the conception of an engine endowed with perpetual 
motion, generating force and supplying its own fuel 
from its own product. Even if God originally made 
the machine, says Spinoza, says Leibnitz, yet, having 
made it, as an unchangeable God He cannot interfere 
to alter or correct it. Hence a miracle so called is 
im2)ossible. 



POSSIBILITY AND FACT OF MIRACLES. 51 

These two different tendencies of the human mind 
may make this question as permanent as human nature 
itself. One class will always refer everything to a living 
will, and the other to a perfect mechanism. The 
North American Magazine for this month (May, 1879) 
gives a symposium in which five distinguished men 
discuss the same question as one of the most interesting 
ones of our day. Cicero gave the same kind of a sym- 
posium twenty centuries ago, and I do not doubt that 
Macaulay^s New Zealander, however distant may be 
the era when he shall flourish, will find this same 
question surviving the wrecks of our present civili- 
zation. Neither army will ever extinguish the other. 
But you will notice that the believer in the possibility 
of miracles by no means denies that God controls the 
universe by fixed and regular rules, or what are usually 
called natural laws. The very idea of a miracle makes 
necessary such a conception ; for a miracle is only a 
miracle as it is distinguished from the usual and ordi- 
nary course of events. Unless God did have fixed and 
definite laws in His government, by the uniform ex- 
perience of which we should know what to expect in 
any case, a miracle would be an impossibility, because 
nothing could be more strange or unexpected than any- 
thing else. So far, then, are fixed natural laws from 
making a miracle impossible, that they alone make 
such a possibility. When the sacred writers record a 
miracle, it is very clear that they regard it as worthy 
of record only because it is so strange and so different 
from what their experience had shown them, and from 
what they thought future experience would show to 



52 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

otliers that it must be preserved. The objection of 
Spinoza that a miracle destroys the conception of an 
unchanging God can stand only when we conceive of 
God as he did, existing somewhere outside of the uni- 
versal machine which He has made with infinite skill. 
If God made the universe as men make machinery, 
simply to save labor, if He made it as a jeweller makes 
a watch, which must be warranted to run without his 
ever seeing it again for so long a time, then to work a 
miracle, to change, or suspend, or stop any part of this 
machine or watch might be said to indicate either 
change of purpose or imperfection in the work. 

But it seems incredible that any one should think 
God made the splendid and interbalancing system, 
where the grain of dust on our planet is in equipoise 
with another grain of matter in the filmy stain upon 
the evening sky where the nebulae lose themselves, for 
any merely physical end, for anything short of some 
great moral purpose, which spans the ages and asso- 
ciates itself not with matter but with spirit. Any 
adequate apprehension of a divine plan must reach 
beyond the matter which we see, and include the being 
which sees it, and that being is moral and spiritual. 
Now, reason from yourself for a moment. In your- 
self you recognize two distinct and differing parts. 
You have a mind and you have a body. Your body 
is made of the same constituents that obtain in earth 
and vegetable. Your mind you cannot analyze; you 
cannot define except by saying it is not matter. But 
God who made them both had a purpose in each. 
Which is likely to be the most important, the ulterior 



POSSIBILITY AND FACT OF MIRACLES. 53 

object with God^ the development of the mind with its 
intellectual and moral powers, or the continued flux 
and reflux of matter ? If you say the moral purpose 
must be the dominant one, then the universe becomes 
only the splendid theatre on which the drama of mind- 
growth is to be played. Every physical law, however 
grand its sweep, becomes merely an instrument, a means 
wdth God for accomplishing some eternal moral pur- 
pose. The instruction of mankind, the evolution of 
Newtons and La Places from Caffirs and Bushmen; 
the gradual shaping of the soul of Wilberforce or 
Florence Nightingale out of the unpromising soul- 
powers of the scurrying crows of the early Anglo- 
Saxon race ; the lifting up and apotheosis of mankind 
from low levels, where they share the instincts and 
pleasures of the brutes, to the highest ranges of the 
soul, where it finds its rest and its companionship with 
God. Think of that beside the highest possibilities of 
natural forces, and how insignificant the latter seem. 
Continents rising from the watery seas, continents 
swept and striated by moving ice-mountains, continents 
cracked and melted by ages of fiery heat, continents 
rising and sinking like bubbles, and what for except 
that they might at last receive as they did the mighty 
forces of organic life over which Mind should rule. 
The storm, before which our souls are timid as it rolls 
its ponderous wheels along the pathway of the skies, 
which overawes us with its frowning masses of black- 
ness charged with the swift lightning, what is its 
object but to sweep the atmosphere and make it fit for 
life to breathe ? The rain, the snow, the sunlight, the 

6^ 



54 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

soil, the air are valuable only as they make life possi- 
ble, and at the apex and crown of living creatures, 
controlling all, using all, dominating all, is the Mind 
and Soul of man, which alone looks forward to immor- 
tality, which alone shares Thought by which the worlds 
were formed. He who thus looks at the moral purpose 
of the universe rather than at its physical grandeur, 
^\\\\ call the elements but the tools of God, and will 
expect those tools to be used as they shall best accom- 
plish the design before Him. He is immutable in His 
great moral purpose. In the instruments He may 
depend upon a mutable human will. 

But take again this definition of Spinoza, for he 
embodied all the modern Deism in his essays: "A 
miracle signifies any work the natural cause of which 
we cannot explain after the example of anything else 
to which we are accustomed.'^ What is the natural 
cause of any phenomenon in nature ? No man knows. 
We know absolutely nothing with certainty as to cause 
and effect. When Hume came to write his philosophi- 
cal essays he acknowledged this. He says, " Even in 
the most familiar events, the energy of the cause is as 
unintelligible as in the most extraordinary and unusual.'^ 
We cannot say absolutely of any two things in nature, 
however often recurring in human experience, that 
therefore they are cause and effect. They may by thus 
recurring together indicate some unknown cause. Take 
gravitation, for instance. We say weight is caused by 
gravitation. "But there may be in matter itself a 
complex system of forces as little known as were the 
gases to Aristotle, and the real cause may lie in them." 



POSSIBILITY AND FACT OF MIRACLES. 55 

Now, when you say, as Hume said, that to prove a 
miracle is impossible, because it is contrary to the ex- 
perience of mankind, which experience is that natural 
cause and effect are regular and certain, his own state- 
ment confronts him. AVe do not know that any two 
phenomena are related to each as cause and eifect. 
Are material phenomena always to be attributed to 
material causes? Not at all. Human will is cer- 
tainly as much a cause as many physical things are. 
If I may set in motion a hundred physical agencies, 
which partially suspend other agencies, if my will 
may change the course of rivers, the sites of moun- 
tains, the temperature of a room, may interfere with 
any natural law to the extent of my physical power, 
what is there impossible in the supposition that God's 
will, by which everything moves, may be a cause ever 
working in the universe, and may, at times, as He 
sees fit, for moral purposes, work in different ways 
from those we call natural ? Behind many natural 
events, then, there lies the human will as a cause. 

When an engine moves, it is by the will of the en- 
gineer. The moving of the lever is the physical cause. 
But the real cause lies outside the physical world, — lies 
in the mind of a man. So behind every physical event 
there lies the will of God, and we cannot deny to God 
the possibility of doing what we know ourselves to do 
every day. It does not only seem possible that a living 
God should make Himself and His moral will known 
by a supernatural action, but it seems most accordant 
with the character in which He is the nearest to us, in 
which all men love to think of Him as a Father. To 



5G DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

say that our Father is able to create a world and to put 
us into it, and yet cannot tell us His will ; to say that 
because He can make so sublime a universe, therefore 
He cannot interfere or work in it ; to say that because 
He made us with an unquenchable desire to know Him 
and what He wants us to do, therefore it is impossible 
that He should reveal Himself and His will, is to trifle 
with our reason and our heart. No, if there be a God, 
He must be in the universe, the last and omnipotent 
cause of all things, and what He will do, and when 
He will do it, and how it shall be done. He who 
framed nature, and who formed the human mind, is able 
to determine for Himself. When we come to analyze 
the question we find, as Hume was constrained to admit, 
that we cannot demonstrate the impossibility of a 
miracle, because it is evidently possible that the course 
of nature might be different. 

You will notice that so far as the present results of 
scientific investigations are valuable they point not only 
to the possibility but to the fact of a miracle. 

To the eyes of every one it is plain that life is now 
existing on the earth. Science tells us and Genesis 
tells us that there was a period when life could not have 
existed on the earth. So life has begun somewhere in 
time. If it developed itself from matter, of course there 
was no creative act, there is no longer a place for God. 
But if it did not so develop itself as the great scientists 
all agree there is no evidence that it did, then there was 
of necessity an external power who created it. But an 
act of creation in time is certainly a miracle by Spinoza's 
definition, by Hume's definition ; and one miracle 



POSSIBILITY AND FACT OF MIRACLES. 57 

conceded leaves no room to deny the possibility of 
more. 

Haeckel is the only consistent deist, because he is an 
atheist. With him, as with Le Fevre, the idea of God 
is an empty chimera. 

II. But did the New Testament miracles take place ? 
The answer to this question must depend upon what 
kind of evidence shall be thought sufficient to prove 
them. Hume^s proposition that no amount of human 
testimony can establish the fact of a miracle because the 
experience of mankind will always be a greater evidence 
to the contrary, has been exploded again and again. 
For the experience of mankind affirms as much as it 
denies a miracle. 

We know experience by history, and it is notorious 
that every people have traditions of miracles, not well 
attested, — mere legends they may be, — but yet they ex- 
press a past experience of belief in miracles. The New 
Testament writers were men, and record miracles as 
part of the experience of their age and nation, and on 
the history of that experience the most enlightened 
people of modern ages have believed in the fact of a 
miracle. How, then, is it true that all the human 
testimony possible cannot stand against the weight of 
human experience, which is divided and nugatory ? 

When it is looked at as a simple question of fact, did 
such events take place, the only kind of evidence neces- 
sary is the human testimony which would establish any 
other unusual fact. 

Take the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the grave 
as the most stupendous fact recorded in human expe- 



58 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

rience. It is an undeniable truth that millions of 
people now cling to that fact as a fact with greater 
intensity than to any other that ever occurred. It 
is equally undeniable that in every age of the past 
since the life of Jesus^ for eighteen centuries, millions 
upon millions have clung to the same fact with the same 
intensity. No fact in human experience has so polar- 
ized the hopes of humanity as this. The granting of 
Magna Charta was probably the most important event 
in the political history of the world. But the Anglo- 
Saxon race, which loves to think of Runnymede because 
a mighty fact took place there, has always turned its 
face with even a deeper reverence to that valley by the 
ancient city of a Semitic race, where took place that 
greater fact of a man raised from the dead. On w^hat 
evidence then has this long and wide-spread belief 
rested ? On the simple, consistent, and calm testimony 
of many witnesses. Not one man, but hundreds saw 
Him risen from the dead. Not only did the sense of 
sight, but that of the ear and of the touch satisfy the 
witnesses. The very same improbability which we 
should attach toward such an event to-day, the wit- 
nesses attached to that then, and were convinced against 
their incredulity. 

The entire narrative, which in the last lecture I 
showed was written by eye-witnesses, shows conclusively 
that the Apostles and disciples had no dream of a resur- 
rection of their leader. They were sadly reconciling 
themselves to the wreck of all their hopes. "We 
trusted that it had been He who should have redeemed 
Israel,^^ they said. The despair of Judas killed him. 



POSSIBILITY AND FACT OF MIRACLES. 59 

Thomas was probably not different from the rest In his 
astonishment and incredulity when he was told of the 
fact of the resurrection. Everything goes to prove that 
the witnesses were calm^ unbiassed, and incredulous at 
first. So far from having formed an opinion and lashed 
themselves into a frenzy of expectation that the event 
must occur, the express, reiterated statements of the 
Gospels are that they absolutely refused credence to it 
at first. " And the disciples, when they had heard that 
He was alive and had been seen of her (Mary), believed 
not. And after that He appeared unto two of them as 
they walked, and they went and told it to the rest, 
neither believed they them. Afterwards He appeared 
unto the eleven as they sat at meat and upbraided them 
with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they 
believed not them which had seen Him after He was 
risen.'^ You cannot reject the testimony of men in 
such a frame of mind on the ground of a bias in favor 
of the fact, any more than you can reject the testimony 
which convinced men so incredulous. Some sceptics 
have boldly taken the ground that the statements of 
miracles in the New Testament are unlimited deceits 
and frauds, — that the whole thing is a tissue of inven- 
tion for ulterior purposes. But so gross and incredible 
a proposition has been almost universally abandoned, 
and these miracles are explained, not denied. One 
great school of sceptics, admitting the Gospel to be 
genuine, suppose the miracles to have been merely 
natural events mistaken for supernatural through zeal 
or enthusiasm. But there is nothing to prove the zeal 
and enthusiasm, and, besides, it is utterly incredible 



GO DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

that such mistakes should occur time and time again 
through years, in every circumstance, and place, and 
mode, and be made by different men exactly in the 
same way. Such a thing is past belief. The senses 
may err, undoubtedly. But the chances that your eyes 
and mine shall see the same illusion at the same time 
and in the same place are almost nothing. That a 
hundred men shall have the same optical defect or phys- 
ical infirmity, so that they shall all believe they see 
the same thing at the same time, is by the law of chances 
improbable almost to impossibility. That different 
senses of these men besides the eye shall also register 
untruly and yet unanimously is beyond belief, because, 
by Hume's definition, it is entirely contrary to all hu- 
man experience. One of the librarians of Harvard 
College, who had been accustomed for many years to 
see a friend of his standing in one particular alcove 
of the library at the same hour of each day, could not 
rid himself of the illusion after that friend's death 
that he still saw him standing there at the usual hour. 
Now, there is a plain case of illusion, felt to be so 
by the witness himself. His sense of sight deceived 
him, as he saw at once when he went up to the sup- 
posed person. But, consider how thoroughly incred- 
ible it is that you or I should have seen the same 
thing and should not have wondered as much at the 
librarian as the banqueters did at Macbeth's illusion. 
Call a hundred men into that library, and is it sup- 
posable that they should all be deceived the same 
way, especially if their ears and fingers assisted in the 
test? Every one feels the strength of such a parallel. 



POSSIBILITY AND FACT OF MIRACLES. 61 

That theory will not do. It raises more miracles than 
it explains. 

Tlien we haye the theory that these are mere legends. 
They were not actual facts, but subsequent inventions 
made to agree with the conception of what Jesus ought 
to have done. They become mythical in their origin. 
But you must remember that as against this theory all 
the evidence points to an early writing of the Gospels. 
Even the mythical school of sceptics do not set a later 
date for the Gospels than twenty-five years after John^s 
death. There is no room for a myth to develop, even 
if it w^ere an age of myths. But in fact the era of 
myths was gone. Even the mythology of the Empire 
was openly laughed at. John the Baptist was the 
greatest prophet since Elias; he came in the spirit and 
power of Elias, the greatest miracle worker of the 
ancient Jews, and yet there is not a miracle attributed 
to John, and they are expressly denied. And yet the 
zeal and enthusiasm for John were far greater than that 
for Jesus. 

Why are not the Gospels and Josephus full of the 
miracles of the Baptist, who was nearer to the age of 
myths than Jesus ? "Why are the youth and early man- 
hood of Jesus entirely devoid of all supernatural mani- 
festations? They w^ho invent a legend of miracles to 
support an idea must fall into the error of the false gos- 
pels which make the child Jesus a capricious wonder- 
worker. No, the theory of myths will not do, because 
the miracles are records by eye-witnesses ; because the 
age of myths was closed, and because the other places 
where myths would most likely appear in the Gospels, 

6 



G2 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

if they occurred in the memoirs of Jesus, are simple and 
prosaic statements of undoubted facts. 

All metaphysical speculations as to the dreams and 
fancies and spectral illusions are as airy and imponder- 
able as dreams themselves. Dreaming men are pretty 
apt to wake up when the fire scorches them and when 
forty stripes save one are laid on their back. As strong 
as is the direct evidence to the miracles of Christ, the 
corroborations which it has are not less so. 

COREOBORATIONS. 

1. The entire history of Palestine, from the earliest 
days to the Christian era, shows a unique and marvel- 
lous preservation of a pure religious idea. Everything 
which differentiated it from surrounding nations em- 
phasized the fact that it was supernaturally preserved 
for some great religious and moral purpose. Its subse- 
quent history shows that from Palestine did really issue 
the one world-religion in Jesus Christ. Judaism be- 
fore Christ, Christianity after Christ, are twin pillars 
supporting the miracles of Christ and supported by 
them. The days of Augustus were the pivot on which 
the old world was swinging into the new. Then more 
than any other time in history was God working in up- 
heaving and reforming old systems and old institutions. 
At no other time would miracles be so natural or so 
important as in a nascent state. 

2. The origin and growth of Christianity are so in- 
explicable upon any other theory than the fact of the 
miracles, that even Gibbon, in his " Secondary Causes,^^ 
is obliged to make the claim of miracles one of the 



POSSIBILITY AND FACT OF MIRACLES. 63 

strongest causes. For Christianity, from the very first, 
rested itself on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, as any 
one may see who reads the sermons of the Apostles in 
the Acts and Epistles. By that fact it conquered. 

Whatever an age christianized may think of miracles, 
it is an undoubted fact that by miracles alone were the 
nations christianized. If Jesus did not rise from the 
dead, the growth of Christianity on that assertion is the 
most stupendous miracle in history. Mohammedanism 
in a hundred years spread from the Ganges to the 
Pyrenees, but at the head of its advance flashed the 
sword of Khaled and Amrou, and behind it lay un- 
coiling the iron will of Omars and Moawiyahs. In 
three hundred years Christianity pushed its way from 
the tomb in the Cedron ravine to the imperial throne 
that swayed the world. At seven hundred years of age 
she met and pushed back the crescent of the Saracen. 
At eighteen hundred years of age she is raising her 
standard in every spot where men breathe. Moham- 
medanism is moribund. Christianity is in the spring 
of virility. 

The weapon that has flashed before her progress 
is the spear that drew water and blood from her 
Founder's heart. The mighty uncoiling spring that lies 
behind her is the fact of the resurrection of that same 
Founder from the grave. Khaled's sword flashes no 
more in the valleys of Syria. Omar's w^ill no longer 
hurls armies like sand pillars from Arabia whirling 
over sea and mountain. But the fact of Christ's resur- 
rection is to-day the mightiest principle in the civiliza- 
tion and hopes of the globe. Such endurance and 



64 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

freslincss of influence is in itself enough to prove its 
miraculous nature. 

3. The conversion of so many great men by these 
miracles at the beginning of Christianity and their 
martyrdom for belief in them is irresistible argument 
corroborating them as facts. 

Fanaticism is not an allowable charge here, because 
fanaticism associates itself not with facts but with 
theories. A man who firmly believes himself to be 
somebody else, and dies rather than give up that belief, 
is a fanatic. But men who die rather than deny the 
testimony of their own senses, tested and tested again, 
cannot be called fanatics. St. Paul died a martyr. At 
one time he was a bitter antagonist to Christianity. If 
there is any way to explain his life and death so philo- 
sophically and sensibly as the way in which he himself 
explains it by an actual sight of the risen Lord, that 
explanation is yet to be made. No one has even ap- 
proximated it in the past. 

4. The grandeur and worth of the miracles them- 
selves corroborate their evidences. Excepting two 
which some have cavilled at, the entire number of them 
tell the same sweet story of a healing and loving God. 
The eleventh chapter of St. John, where the pathetic 
story of a broken home in Bethany is told, where 
Lazarus comes forth at the weeping Saviour's cry, while 
the Jews exclaim, " Behold how He loved him,'' is the 
sublimest Thanatopsis ever given to man. The widow's 
son, the man born blind, the sleeping daughter in 
Capernaum, how powerfully they bear in upon the 
consciousness the conviction that it is as easy for Him 



POSSIBILITY AND FACT OF MIRACLES. 65 

to say " Thy sins are forgiven thee/^ as to say ^^ Take 
up thy bed and walk" ! How they blend with all His 
life and death as evidences of a Saviour's love ! How 
true they are to our conception of what a God-man 
should do ! We feel at once when we read them that 
they are just our ideals of miracles. Not by works 
upon the sun and stars, not by the convulsions of the 
elementary world does the Saviour assert His divinity, 
but in the hospital corridors of life, where men are weak 
and suffering, and dying and dead, His divine presence 
moves, and suffering humanity at its lowest ebb touches 
God and lives again. Misery raises its head and smiles. 
Women from whom street-boys start away touch His 
hand and become the Magdalenes whom generations 
yet unborn shall love. These are the Gospel miracles, 
these are the instinctive virtues of a life which some 
call a falsehood and some a legend. But the world will 
not willingly let them die so long as by all the evidence 
of senses, and by the reasoning of the human intellect, 
they stand as facts in history. 



6* 



AMUSEMENTS. 

William Cowper said, '^God made the country 
and man made the town/^ Long before him Cowley 
had expressed the same thouglit in a yet more vivid 
way : " God the first garden made, and the first city, 
Cain/^ 

These are but echoes of the common voice of poets and 
philosophers who have studied the effect of large cities 
upon the moral condition of mankind. One of the 
greatest problems that the last two centuries have had 
to solve, and one which is still unsolved, is the care 
of large masses of people gathered in centres. The 
rise of manufacturing interests has made astonishing 
changes in the aspect of the social world. In the reign 
of Charles II. there was no provincial town in Eng- 
land containing thirty thousand people, and there were 
only four which contained as many as ten thousand, 
and now more than one-sixth of the whole population 
is crowded into cities of more than thirty thousand 
population. Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield, 
Manchester, each an imperial city, have grown from 
insignificant hamlets in six generations. Berlin,Vienna, 
Paris, St. Petersburg, how they w^ould astonish Fred- 
erick the Great, Maria Theresa, the magnificent Louis, 
and the simple Peter could they see them now. In 
our own day we have seen villages become cities. San 



AMUSEMENTS. 67 

Francisco and Cliicago were scarcely on tlie maps 
thirty years ago. Those who have read E. D. Mans- 
field's '^Memoirs'' may realize what a Cincinnati he 
has seen expand from Front Street, between Broadway 
and Sycamore, in 1808. The great problem is thrust 
upon us with all of its branching propositions. How 
shall we house this vast throng, how feed them, how 
educate them, how control them, how keep them 
healthy in body iind morals and mind ? We are in 
the age of great municipalities. It is an inspiring and 
yet awful thought for the observer of human interests 
that another century may contemplate our present enor- 
mous cities, which give us so much difficulty, as but 
the germs of the mightier cities which shall be then, 
and shall speak of them as we speak of those of half a 
century ago. It is not to be denied that in some 
respects the growth and multiplication of large cities 
have been detrimental to the best interests of society, 
as in other respects they have been beneficial and in- 
dispensable. . The changes in living, the changes in 
travel, the multiplication of conveniences in business, 
in amusements, in education, the entire disruption of 
the old habits of life have made the experience of the 
last generation very nearly useless in raising this one. 
Father and child have had to learn together, and the 
child has early discovered that in many things which 
make up his modern world his parent's experience 
began with his own. 

The young mind is not apt to distinguish between 
knowledge and wisdom, although the distinction is 
fundamental and vast; as great, indeed, as between 



68 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

the mulbeny-leaf swinging on the tree and the flashing 
silk fabric tliat has been worked up from it, and con- 
sequently we are in an age when, more than in any- 
other age in history, youth refuses homage to years, and 
beardless ignorance sneers at the warnings of venerable 
wisdom. The study of history, which is absolutely 
necessary to a generation who are '' heirs of all the 
ages,^^ and without which it cannot hope to avoid the 
" crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind,^^ of which 
record Gibbon makes history consist, is neglected for 
rash experimentation and bubbling theories. In re- 
ligious matters, young men will not lean on the 
matured wisdom of many generations. In finance, 
the present age refuses to be guided by Montague and 
Walpole, to be warned by John Law, the South Sea, 
and the Mississippi Company. In practical ethics, the 
well-known and defined limits which ages have marked 
out for right and wrong are fearlessly transgressed, and 
with a smile on their lips young people rush into 
pleasures which, unless human experience is at fault, 
must end in destruction alike to soul and body. 

Liberalism in religion has made liberalism in morals. 
I do not know that Cincinnati is any worse than other 
great cities in the kind of amusements provided for 
young men, but it is perfectly clear that she provides 
everything that can destroy manhood, burn out spirit- 
uality, and ruin soul and body. Under the starlight 
she lies as a vast net to trip up unwary feet. Her 
pride, and her just pride is that she can draw crowds 
to her attractions and her entertainments. In the 
grind and whirl of our common life it is a noble thing 



AMUSEMENTS, 69 

to have many ways of lifting men out of ruts once in a 
wliile ; to see thousands of mechanics and laborers lay 
down tlieir tools, and get away from noisy machinery 
and flying chips and dirty hods, and with clean clothes 
and clean bodies laugh off the fatigues of a week, or be 
blessed with a little insight into the world of music 
and art and heaven. To see them come up to the 
surface of this troubled sea of life for a fresh breath of 
air and a glimpse of an upper w^orld is a glad thing 
for a man who cares for the happiness of others in some 
real way. But it ought to be carefully and persist- 
ently enforced upon young men that there is such a 
thing as a false and pernicious amusement, — that, like 
everything else in nature, it may kill those who think 
it is curing them. To draw a line between the ex- 
tremes of Puritanism, which is shocked by a merry 
laugh, and the extremes of liberalism, w^hich washes 
out drunkenness or adultery with a sentiment, may be 
very easy. But to discriminate between the vast mul- 
titudes that lie between these extremes ; to say where 
innocent pleasure passes into conscious sin ; to say how 
far Canute^s chair can be pushed out on the beach and 
yet be safe from the grasp of the remorseless weaves, is 
not easy. And that is the trouble which the religious 
and moral* instinct in man has in chaperoning, if I may 
use the common word, the appetites and passions. Like 
young, inexperienced, volatile, and innocent girls, the 
passions are constantly saying, "Let me do this, just 
this one time, I am sure it will not hurt me," and like 
the more fearful parent who better understands the 
springs of human nature, religion has constantly to 



70 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

interpose its checks and its reprimand, and gains the 
reputation of liarsliness and fossilism because it has the 
far-si2:htcdness of old a2:e. But in the same way that 
a parent longs for nothing on earth so much as the 
happiness of the child, so the very soul and nerve of 
religion is the desire to enlarge and educate and beau- 
tify the life of human nature. The God who gave 
His only Son to die that men might be happy in a life 
to come, is the same that equipped them for a million 
pleasures in the life they now live. When He made 
the eye He painted a universe of ever-changing beauties, 
rolling clouds filled with fire or chilled into alabaster, 
swaying forests, tumbling oceans, soaring mountains, 
mingled flowers and grasses, all to delight and gratify 
it. When He made the ear he did not forget its appe- 
tites for harmony, and tuned the universe to a mighty 
symphony rising from the rustling grain, the singing 
birds, the murmuring streams, the sullen storm-bass, 
the whole "earth with its thousand voices praising 
God.^^ When He made man dependent, like an engine, 
on food and water. He differentiated him from an engine 
in that He gave him a palate which should yield him 
many pleasures, even in the necessary repair work of 
the physical system. If some people could make a race 
according to their ideas, they would strike out the 
palate and make a lid in the shoulder or side where, 
at stated times, so much food or fuel might be shovelled 
in, and they think it would be a very much better 
arrangement. But God thought differently. Out of 
the most common necessity of our nature He has con- 
structed one of its greatest enjoyments. Everything 



AMUSEMENTS. 71 

that God has given us in the way of capacity or func- 
tion for pleasure has its correspondent means of grati- 
fication. There is no normal appetite or desire that 
fails to find its object in nature, and there is nothing 
in God^s Word which anyways contradicts the design 
manifest in His works. While the Bible especially, 
and as a matter of course, deals with the serious ques- 
tions of our origin and destiny, it is full of encourage- 
ments and suggestions as to pleasures and habits, and 
the current of it all is " Be joyous.^^ 

If a Christian, who holds the promise of both lives, 
that which now is and that which is to come, cannot 
be bright and merry and full of sunshine, there is some- 
thing wrong. He is a Christian only as he grows in 
genial and loving and helping humanity. 

And he best exemplifies and establishes the divine 
origin of his religion who shows to men that it has 
stimulated and evoked all the functions of his nature 
and made him more manly in every sense, — a creature 
of joy as well as of hope. Why, it is a fearful thing to 
see a good Christian minister drop into a social gather- 
ing and the young people fall away from him as if 
they were charged with a negative current of electricity, 
and they wouldn^t do it if somehow or other the idea 
had not got abroad that a right good laugh and free 
conversation made him feel despondent as to the wel- 
fare of humanity. And, on the other hand, I think 
it is a good sign of the times that there is a rapidly 
increasing number of ministers who are welcomed and 
sought after by young people, and who at least get a 
chance to impress upon them that it is possible to 



72 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

retain something of humanity side by side with some- 
thing of divinity. Let this not be thought to be a 
censure on anybody. I speak only for myself, with 
the highest possible respect and reverence for those 
who may differ from me as to the life which a minister 
should live and the habits he should form. But I can 
never abandon the thought that the only way to teach 
young people is to be young myself, and that it is a 
monstrous mistake to think that youth is a matter of 
years and the color of the hair. Some men are patri- 
archal at twenty, and some are mere boys at seventy, 
and in every theological seminary there ought to be a 
chair whose sole duty should be to teach us how to 
keep young and fresh. And perhaps the first position 
that such an instructor would have to take would be 
that the only way to keep young and unworn is to 
diversify life by amusements, the same amusements 
which others need and have, but from which, as a 
class, ministers keep away. But now that I have said 
this much in order that you may understand the frame 
of mind in which I discuss this question of amusements, 
and that you may see that I am not in any sense a 
biassed or prejudiced adviser, let me put before you, 
young men, as a young man myself, who shares your 
experiences and your temptations, a few thoughts 
which ought to influence us all. 

1. In the first place, what is the primary reason of 
amusement? It is defined in one of its synonymes, 
recreation. That only is an amusement which recreates, 
builds up again. Well, then, something must have 
been used up, worn out, before amusement can be real. 



AMUSEMENTS. 73 

There can be no recreation without prior labor. He 
reads the Old Testament very superficially who gets 
from it the thought that labor is spoken of as a curse. 
When the Paradise was ready in its vernal beauty for 
the coming Man, when Man was created pure and 
happy, the first command that ever fell on human ears 
was the command to till and labor and prune. Even 
Paradise could not be enjoyed unless work was done. 
The curse was something later than that. It was the 
hard and unwilling and worrying toil of a man who 
had lost his disposition and power to see the bright 
side of life, who fretted over the briars and grumbled 
over sterile soil, whose whole character had been 
changed and soured and turned away from God. 
If you want to enjoy life, if you want real amusement, 
then, you must have some regular and positive work. 

Of all the creatures between heaven and earth, there 
are none so miserable as those who have nothing to do. 
Life becomes a burden and how to pass the time a 
problem. Take a young man who has plenty of money 
and no business, — nothing to do but just enjoy him- 
self. Why, the inexperienced say, that is just my ideal 
of happiness; that is just what every man is looking 
forward to. And yet I believe firmly that a hod- 
carrier gets more enjoyment out of a piece of bread 
and cheese than this other man can get out of all his 
resources. For pleasure becomes a more wearying 
labor than hod-carrying would be. Look at him. At 
ten or eleven o^clock in the morning he creeps out of 
bed, stirs up the sluggish currents of his mind over the 
morning papers, yawns over his breakfast, gets ready 
D 7 



74 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

to go out, and then wonders where he shall go. One 
place bored him yesterday, another place the day before. 
He can't eat all the time, nor drink up a whole day. 
He can't go to his friends, because they are at work. 
Generally speaking, this kind of a man don't want to 
read anything more inspiring than the New York Clip- 
per or Spirit of the Times, He yawns through the 
afternoon, brightening up toward evening, and just 
begins to be himself and get his eyes open when other 
men want to go to bed. In the summer he can go 
North, in the winter South, but the one thing that 
prevents him from enjoyment is satiety. He has left 
out the most necessary element of amusement, — labor. 
Any man can enjoy a good dinner when he is hungry. 
No man can enjoy a succession of dinners. The appe- 
tite, once satisfied, must be recreated, and the only way 
that can be done is by such physical or mental labor as 
uses up some bodily tissues, and makes a demand for 
more food to supply the loss. Now, such a young man 
as I have described is as surely killing himself by so- 
called amusements as if he were taking poison every 
day in increasing doses. For his body is a piece of 
machinery, in which every part is nicely adjusted to 
every other. The stomach and the brain, the blood 
and the lungs, all have their function, and all must be 
exercised in proper ways. Go and look at a loom when 
it is in motion ; how wonderfully true it is in all it 
docs! How different pieces all seem as by instinct to 
do their joint work accurately and swiftly ! Let it lie 
idle a month and then try it, and it creaks and labors, 
and is faulty. Rest and rust are boon companions. 



AMUSEMENTS, 75 

Machinery in iron mills, which cost thousands of dol- 
lars, is only old iron after a long vacation. Well, there 
is no mechanism ever invented more exquisite and 
complicated than the organism of your body. I once 
heard a lecture on the throat explained by charts, and 
it so impressed me with the delicacy and beauty of the 
complex apparatus that I wanted to speak in a whisper 
all the rest of the day for fear something might give 
way or get tangled. And no man ever yet has seen 
very far into the wonders of the brain, the thought- 
producer. Now, think of letting this machinery rust 
and fall to decay by negligence and want of use ; think 
of a brain never exercised and perhaps constantly 
drenched with alcohol or clouded with narcotics ; think 
of a fine watch movement kept under water, and how 
much doubt is there of the result ? No, an amusement 
which is constant, which is a rule and not a rest of 
nature, is a cruel disease. I would rather break stone 
upon the road from morning till night than to have 
the awful torments of an empty life. Out of the pains 
and stings and weariness of the day there issues the 
great though unrecognized pleasure of an active and 
useful life. And, on the other hand, I imagine that a 
man who does nothing but amuse himself must at 
times have an overwhelming sense of his own useless- 
ness and insignificance. He ought to tread carefully, 
lest he crush a more useful creature than himself hid- 
den in the dust. And yet so strongly is the tide setting 
away from what is called common labor that it never 
occurs to any young man that it may be worth his 
while to be a shoemaker or painter if his father can 



76 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

keep him in idleness. Many a man has a family of 
boys who do nothing, because they think themselves 
too good for a clerkship or a lathe, and other men do 
not think them good enough for anything else. So the 
days go by, the father supporting them as he can, and 
they have night and day to fill up somehow in amuse- 
ments. Those boys are rusting every day. Their 
better powers are relaxing and weakening. Their 
whole life, full of great possibilities, which might span 
mighty seas of enterprise, is rotting at the wharf. 
Better take a hoe and raise cabbages, better get on the 
lowest edge of the treadmill of human labor and create 
enjoyments for yourself than to be satiated and worn 
out at the very threshold of your manhood. You may 
think this is exaggeration, and that every man w^ould 
live that life if he were not driven to work by neces- 
sity. But do you remember vacations at school, 
how delightful the first day of the week was, how 
heavily the last went, what a relief it was at last to 
take up again the old grind at the books, — the same 
books which were so joyfully thrown away a little 
w^hile before? We are the same boys now in our 
nature, and the same law governs us in the great 
decay of natural life. To lay down the books 
for a while, to get out of the old forms, to have a 
grand time on the play-ground, to let the mind rest, or 
the busy fingers, or the tired arms, is splendid. But 
when the bell rings back to Avork, and the long files 
string in to their different tasks, I have only pity for 
the one who lingers by himself and plays on and on 
drearily w^aiting till the tides of life set out again. All 



AMUSEMENTS. 77 

their life is full and bursting with capacity for enjoy- 
ment. Abstinence has increased desire. With the 
wild abandon springing from the sense of duty done, 
of work accomplished, they fling themselves into games 
and amusements from which his tired nature shrinks, 
and at last he can neither study nor enjoy himself. He 
sinks into an atrophy, and when he dies there is not 
an ounce of active force removed from human afiairs. 

Constant and idle amusement not only kills the mental 
and physical life of a young man, but it strikes deeper 
yet into the nerve of his soul. It kills the powers by 
which we hope for eternal happiness. For the man 
who has nothing to do but to seek pleasure soon passes 
beyond the limits of a normal, moral life, and finds every 
idle moment a pressing and crescent temptation. Along 
the whole gamut of his human instincts swift-fingered 
temptation strikes, and the bass responds with the pres- 
sure. Many a sin which other men escape by reason 
of pressing business haunts him out in his listlessness 
and stabs him to the very soul. I can only appeal to 
your personal experience in this matter, but I can do 
that much boldly. For I am sure that the conscious- 
ness of you all responds to what I say that your most 
bitter recollections of unmanly and wicked thoughts and 
words and actions carry you back to the idle epochs of 
your life. If you haven^t anything to do every day as 
a regular employment, in the name of all you hold 
sacred find something for yourself, or the devil will. 
Make your amusements recreation, change from labor. 
No matter what you have to spend by inheritance or 
gift, — the more you have the worst, — no matter what 

7* 



78 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

you have to do in the way of occupation, find something 
and put your soul into it with the sweet conviction that 
far grander men have done and are now doing the same 
labor, however humble it be and however ungentleman- 
like it may seem. That is the most abominable word 
that ever struck manhood from our race. Do you sup- 
pose that in all the fine instincts and affections which 
underlie the gentleman's character there are not as 
many gentlemen laying brick and stoking engines as 
there are making bows in parlors and laws in legisla- 
tures? They may not have the same polish externally 
that comes from association with refined and cultured 
people. But I should rather be a gentleman behind a 
wheelbarrow than a roue or a do-nothing. 

It ought to be an agony for you to know that you 
are like one of the apple-blossoms that are blown off 
from the tree. Think of it as it lies there with all its 
possibilities within it. God made it just like the thou- 
sands that are clinging still and developing new life, 
and yet it is but a beautiful wreck that shall drop to 
pieces and carry down its capabilities with it into dust. 
Don't let your life decay like that. Don't let your 
energies sink into the ground. Be something, do some- 
thing that is honest and active, and remember that in 
ancestral lineage the blood of Howard and Montmor- 
ency is but of yesterday beside that of a gardener and 
his wife, and that all the sceptres which govern men 
are cut from the worn handle of an ancient spade. 

2. Not only must work precede amusements, making 
them a recreation, but these amusements, to be health- 
ful, must satisfy y not stimulate, appetites and passions. 



AMUSEMENTS. 79 

Man craves amusements just as he does food. The in- 
stincts of nature are mandatory. He cannot toil day 
by day without satisfying hunger, nor without satisfy- 
ing the many-voiced demands of his soul for esthetic 
and physical relaxation. But to have a hunger that is 
inappeasable, that grows with what it feeds upon, is a 
sure sign of disease. So any amusement from which 
you get up unsatisfied and clamorous is not normal, is 
dangerous. 

GAMBLING. 

Take a very common form of dissipation, gambling. 
There are hundreds of places in this city where young 
men can gather for this so-called amusement. Every 
game of ball, every race, event of any kind, is made a 
subject of wager. A young man says, '' What harm is 
there in it ? It is just what they do on ^change, only 
their chips are pork, or flour, or grain. But the whole 
system of business is getting to be merely a system of 
betting that prices will rise or fall.^^ And so it is. If 
I were in active mercantile life I should regard with 
great anxiety the present condition of business. For 
gambling, whether conducted as a business or as a 
pleasure, is undoubtedly vicious and destructive. The 
common experience of the race so pronounces it. And 
the reason is clear. It constantly stimulates beyond its 
power to gratify. It acts on the soul just as salt water 
does on the thirst. It increases and makes ravenous 
the appetite it ought to quench. The more you drink, 
the thirstier you are. The more you win, the more you 
want. The more you lose, the more you must regain. 
There is nothing in human nature so revolting as the 



80 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

cursed effects of gambling. Hot and feverish, eager 
and trembling, a man gets up from this amusement. 
You may think it easy to leave off, to lose or win a few 
pieces with equanimity, to take pleasure in it for an 
hour ; but, unless men are wrong, it has a diabolic fas- 
cination. It made men sick to see Fox gamble hour 
after hour and night after night. The man who could 
control a Senate by the powers of his mind could not 
rise from his chair so long as he could hold the cards. 
And at the moment of rising the appetite which he had 
spent forty consecutive hours in trying to quench w^as 
raging with the virulence of insanity. The picture of 
the old grandfather in "Curiosity Shop'^ is a true and 
vivid one. It is a dangerous and false amusement 
which will surely kill your peace and purity. It was a 
grand day when the Philistines had Samson to amuse 
them. But as the days went by and his strength grew, 
he became more dangerous even while he amused them 
better. And he who had begun as a weak and chained 
slave, obedient to their beck and nod, was able at last 
to kill those whom he amused. Take care that the 
cursed vice of gambling be not your Samson. Weak 
in its beginnings you may control it then, but there 
will come a time when, if it bends itself and puts forth 
its matured strength, you will be crushed with the 
thousands of others who have laughed and sneered at 
the supposed weakness of the slave. Awaken in your- 
self once the desire of making money without labor, 
and all the wealth of Ormus and the Ind will not 
gratify it. Worse than the drunkard^s thirst, it never 
drugs until it kills. So much liquor wall drench the 



AMUSEMENTS. 81 

brain, and the man Is for the time dead and must stop. 
But the fearful mania of the gambler knows no stupor. 
It is a rising fever which masters the nature and never 
declines until it has burned its way to the very core of 
life. And yet In these hundreds of gambling holes in 
our cities, running contrary to law, the great majority 
of the frequenters are very young men. To say that 
the city should allow liberty in these things is opposed 
to common sense. 

There are certain duties and certain responsibilities 
resting on every city as a guardian over wards. She 
is bound to take care of her insane, unfortunate, poor, 
prisoners, convicts, blind, and also of her minors. The 
statement that the city allowed faro-tables and gambling- 
rooms in her asylums and public institutions, where 
liberty was given to the Inmates to play or not, would 
create a wild burst of popular indignation. But that 
her young men and boys, in every sense of the word 
her most important and promising wards, should find 
these dens open to them, lawlessly, at every corner does 
not make any Impression. If the city has any functions 
to discharge, she certainly Is bound to protect her young 
from scoundrels and from scoundrelism, and she is 
bound to do this without and even in opposition to their 
will. 

VARIETY THEATRES. 

Again, take the variety theatres. They fall under 
the same head of amusements which stimulate the worst 
passions that men have. They have but one object, and 
that is to reach down into the slums and gutters of the 
nature and nourish the life that creeps and hides there. 
/ 



82 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

They toucli and arouse dormant instincts that men 
ouglit to struggle to keep asleep. They fire the whole 
sold with unsacred flames, and no man ever yet went to 
them for a normal gratification of his nature and came 
away satisfied, unless he came away a fallen man. 
Amusements are to fill the demands of ordinary appe- 
tites, so far as those appetites are right and pure. But 
amusements which are hot-houses, where, in an un- 
natural temperature, passions are forced and driven into 
activity, kill by over-stimulation, and make nature a 
collection of monstrosities. That is just what these 
worst forms of city vice do. They so inflate the im- 
agination, they so ignore the checks and safeguards of 
reason and decency, that every motion and action, bad 
as they are, are contrived so as to suggest something 
worse ; and I care not who the man is who attends 
these places, he must in time have the enamel of his 
soul eaten off by the atmosphere of them. The imagina- 
tion which is crow^ded with the images of licentious 
display becomes at last the picture-gallery where the 
soul loves most to dwxll, and amid those creations of 
an impure but potent artist his real life is spent. 
AVhatever he may seem to men w^ho meet and converse 
with him and see the external life of him, he knows 
that he is only himself when he gets into the secret 
gallery of his imagination ; that he is real only when 
he passes from image to image of the filthiest products 
of a filthy soul. The man who has, like Coleridge, 
seen the sun rise on Chamouni cannot obliterate the 
impressions of that splendid image though he live a 
thousand years. A man who has saturated himself 



AMUSEMENTS. 83 

with the impurities of a bad variety theatre shall not 
wash his memory and his imagination clean though he 
live a dozen lives and turn the currents of Lethe 
through them. There is a cruelty and callousness in 
the heart of the man who loves to visit these places. 
We speak of the amusements of old Eome^ where men 
struggled and were mangled and killed, while a laugh- 
ing and excited crowd looked on. But they were sub- 
linie, they were God-like when contrasted with these 
arenas where purity is tortured, where a crowd of men 
who have mothers and sisters laugh and applaud the 
poor fallen creatures who are slowly killing themselves, 
soul and body, to amuse them. I say it is the remains 
of savage cruelty in us that makes men take delight in 
such exhibitions. There is where we touch the beasts and 
sink beneath them. I have one thought for a young 
man who shall visit these places to-night or to-morrow 
night. Sit quietly down and watch some young girl 
who shall be there. Exercise your thought one minute 
as to her past and present. Remember that she was 
once like your sister or your mother. Once she would 
have blushed to see you stare at her so. Think what 
she is now. Ask yourself what anguish yours would 
be if your sister were there before these men. Think 
of her future, a mere toy to be broken and thrown 
away into the streets, and then if you can do anything 
else but cry and go away, I tell you the bloodiest arena 
of ancient Rome had not a worse man than you in its 
amphitheatre. You are cruel to the soul. You have 
failed in the most splendid attribute of your divine 
nature, pity for distress and woman's weakness. You 



84 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

have been recreant to every principle of honest chivalry. 
You have done that which should prevent you from 
lifting a hand or saying a word if your own wife, or 
sister, or friend should be sneered at and insulted by 
other men who care no more for her than you do for 
the poor girl on the stage, who has a mother or brother, 
perhaps, suffering agony for her at home, and marvel- 
ling that men can be so cruel. Knowing this, as a man 
of human sympathies, if you can find amusement in the 
exhibition of these poor girls, if your nature can find 
comfort in seeing and helping them down the whirling 
depths of their maelstrom-like life, may God help you, 
for only He who once made man from earth can recre- 
ate manhood when it is again so earthy. 

PUBLIC BALLS. 

I have not time to speak of other kinds of bad 
amusements. I had intended to speak of the public 
balls, which are so common, where temptations are 
multiplied and ordinary safeguards removed. Among 
your own circle of friends you are naturally restrained 
and guided by many considerations. Self-respect is 
assisted by the desire to retain social standing, by the 
unwillingness to lose character among your own friends, 
by family considerations, by conventional forms. But 
among strangers who touch your social life nowhere, 
who never saw you before and never shall see you 
again, all clustering restraints of fear nnd prudence are 
withdrawn. They are dangerous and immoral amuse- 
ments which demand as much from us and cut away 
more than half our power. And whatever may be said 



AMUSEMENTS. 85 

for dancing in ordinary social gatherings of friends and 
acquaintances, cannot be applied for a moment to danc- 
ing among strangers in public or private. There can- 
not be two opinions as to the bad effects of such balls 
on personal character and on municipal morality. 

Beyond these few specific amusements which I have 
mentioned as especially dangerous, — gambling, variety, 
shows, and public balls, — there are many others w^hich 
each one may easily detect for himself. I have em- 
phasized these particularly because they are so numer- 
ous and so bad, and because they are general in their 
influence. But every young man can very easily see 
where his amusements are drifting him, and I do not 
know any better rule than this to govern you: that any 
amusement is unsafe which from its nature would pre- 
vent your sister from enjoying it with you. I do not 
say that a man should go nowhere or do nothing unless 
it would be proper for his sister or mother to be seen 
there. But he should do nothing that in its own nature 
is unfit for his sister to know and hear. There is the 
decorum of society, and there is the decorum of virtue. 
The first may exclude her from your proper amuse- 
ments, the latter never should. For if your sister would 
be mortified and ashamed, you may be sure God does 
not approve it, and any amusement w^hich God con- 
demns cannot be a safe amusement for man whom God 
made. 

And now I have finished my message to you to- 
night. I have spoken of amusements which are 
dangerous because they are constant and unbroken by 
any regular occupation, and of those which are danger- 

8 



86 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

ous because they are stimulating to the worst elements 
in a nature which is not too good at its best. 

I beg you to consider what I have said and see 
whether the voice of the preacher is not the voice of 
the conscience, and the voice of the conscience the voice 
of God. To deny you such false amusements is not to 
limit the capabilities of the nature, unless it be narrow- 
ing a flower-bed to tear out its weeds. There is a whole 
world of innocent amusements over which our nature 
may wing its flight. God has not left the lower ani- 
mals to starve because the henbane and the deadly 
nightshade may not be safely eaten by them. He has 
not left man comfortless because there are poisons in 
his world of pleasure. Among the splendors of His 
creations He sends you forth unlimited, a master. All 
you see is yours, of everything that makes you happy 
you may freely take ; there is only one thing of which 
He warns you, and that is that in the cool of the great 
evening He will walk among the trees and call for you. 
Be sure that you have not eaten of that experimental 
knowledge of evil, or else your muffled voice shall 
answer like another's did, /^ I was ashamed and hid 
myself.^^ And if you have so eaten, as, alas ! who has 
not, be sure you seek forgiveness and strength from the 
only one from whom they flow, Jesus Christ, who is 
to us forgiveness of sins and a fountain springing up 
within us to everlasting life. 



READING. 

To know what to read is as important as to know 
what to eat. If the mind has a lease of life extend- 
ing beyond that of the body, it may be said that to 
know what to read is more important than to know 
what to eat. For the mind has its laws and its func- 
tions as the body has. Its health and its strength de- 
pend on the nourishment you give it. It is vigorous 
or flaccid as it is fed or starved. Because the intellect 
is invisible in its workings, and because it seems to get 
along somehow without much cultivation, many people 
are ready to deny it any regular laws such as are recog- 
nized as governing the body. When a man eats too 
much rich food at dinner he is ready to say, '' I shall 
suffer for this. I shall feel indigestion to-night.'' 
When he walks too much he feels at once that to- 
morrow will find him worn out and useless. He 
knows these effects must follow in accordance with 
physical laws. The health of the body depends on 
the exercise of the functions in conformity with their 
requirements. Physical suffering makes men careful 
to avoid those actions from which physical suffering 
flows, but there are very few who have learned that 
it is just as dangerous to ignore or violate the laws 
by which the mind lives. Metaphysics is not yet a 
popular study, and is not known as a science by the 

87 



88 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

masses of a community. And the young mind is just 
like the young body, — most desirous of those foods 
which are least substantial and most gratifying. Chil- 
dren would rather have candy any time than roast 
beef, and would rather read fairy tales than English - 
history. 

Just at this time the world is flooded with reading- 
matter. Presses are constantly multiplying themselves 
and increasing their productive energy. Contrast a 
young man in the days of Luther^s boyhood with a 
young man of to-day, and it is marvellous how much 
the world has changed. Luther had a few volumes 
of his own and access to the volumes accumulated in 
the library at Erfurt, but a second-hand bookstore 
contains more books, probably, than he ever saw. All 
the vast range of periodical, newspaper, and magazine 
literature was unknown to him. At Rome he saw the 
great library which Nicholas "V. had begun in the 
Vatican, and was elated with the splendid literary 
achievements of the scholars about Leo and the rising 
school around the Medicis in Florence, and yet any 
young man to-day has more books open to him than 
all the scholars of the Reformation era put together. 
Every morning sees a thousand volumes born. For 
five cents you can buy as much reading-matter as will 
occupy you two hours constantly reading. And it is 
not to be supposed that in the deluge of brain-food 
there is not much that is bad and dangerous. There 
is no seal put upon the press. From it issues every- 
thing that will pay for itself in money. All censor- 
ship is removed, except that of selfish consideration of 



READING. 89 

gain and loss. The metal from which the Sermon on 
the Mount has just been printed may be melted up 
and poured into the matrix to form the plates from 
which the last obscenity shall be made public. 

The markets where the mind buys, unlike those 
where the body is supplied, are entirely uninspected 
and unguarded. In such a condition of things it is 
highly important that this liberty of choice, which is 
unavoidable and perhaps salutary, should be accompa- 
nied with some considerations and warnings. The 
very fact that there is so much to read perplexes a 
thinking man as to what he shall take and what re- 
ject. The fact that there is so much good and so 
much bad, and that life is so short, makes a thinking 
man anxious to avoid mistakes and make as much of 
himself as he possibly can. Now, in what I shall say 
to-night I shall put the mind in analogy with the 
body, and the food of the mind in analogy with the 
food of the body. 

DIVERSITY OF HEADING. 

1. In the first place, then, the mind, like the body, 
has different functions, and requires changes of diet. 
No kind of literature, however good it may be, can 
round out the mind into healthy fulness by itself. 
See how your body is constituted. The food that you 
take into the stomach is worked up into chyle and 
poured into the blood, but it must have different in- 
gredients in it to meet differing demands. Give a man 
nothing but potatoes day by day, and the demand for 
starch will be exceeded and other demands ignored. 

8* 



90 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

He must have some food that nourishes the bones with 
lime, some that supplies the brain with pliosphorus, 
some animal food that repairs the general waste of the 
body. He may satisfy the cravings of hunger with 
anything and with the same thing every day. Simeon 
Stylites managed to keep life in himself for forty years 
with a scanty diet of dates and water and herbs, but 
his body was a mere wreck ; it accomplished nothing 
but simply holding together. If a man wants to get 
normal and regular work from his physical members 
he must give them the food by which they work, and 
that is as different as bone and muscle and gray matter 
and tissue are different. So it is with your mind. You 
must not starve one faculty while you overfeed another. 
You must read something in every department of liter- 
ature, — enough at least to exercise and keep alive all 
functions of your mind. Analyze yourself now and 
see how much that means. You have an acquiring 
faculty which demands knowledge. You may derive 
this knowledge partially through the senses and par- 
tially by conversation, but it is by reading the experi- 
ences of others that you will learn the most. It is 
very strange that we speak of the people of past days 
as the ancients, whereas, as Sydney Smith has said, in 
everything implied by that word we are the ancients. 
We have the experience and the height of years. 
^^ They were clever children, and we only are the 
white-bearded, silver-headed ancients who have treas- 
ured up and are prepared to profit by all the experience 
which human life can supply.^^ Standing thus at the 
summit of human progress, every man feels an in- 



READING, 9jL 

stinctive desire to know what mankind have done in the 
past. Emerson^ in his " Essay on History/^ asks why 
there is such a feverish curiosity to find out the origin 
and nature of the Pyramids and ancient remains, and 
answers by the suggestion that it is because we are so 
anxious to know that the men of those days were just 
such men as we are, and moved by the same motives. 
We must establish the permanence of human charac- 
teristics. And so we are all of us constantly wanting 
to know something new which is really old. Our ac- 
quiring faculty, antennae-like, is thrown out before us, 
groping its way into new regions. 

The murder of Csesar is just as exciting and novel 
to the person who hears of it for the first time as that 
of Perceval or Lincoln. 

The study of history, then, is demanded by the in- 
stincts of the nature. You cannot safely neglect it. 
Every day of your life you ought to learn some addi- 
tional facts as to the sayings and doings of those who 
have preceded us on the earth. It is a good thing to 
be informed as to the pedigree of the reigning trotter ; 
but doesn't it seem a little incongruous that some 
men who can tell you about half a dozen generations 
of their horses, couldn't tell you whether the Great 
Charter was an event in the history of their ances- 
tors or of that of the Chinese, and have no more 
conception of the mighty contest out of which their 
fathers fought the way into peace and liberty which 
we have inherited than they have of the Sylburgian 
methods? Just see what a circle of acquaintances you 
can call up about you. When you retire from the 



92 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

active hum of struggling life and sit down before your 
books, and by a gesture call Shakspeare back to paint 
human nature for you, or Dante to sing to you out of 
the great score of his life, or Gibbon to pass before 
you in splendid array the men and women of imperial 
Rome, or Luther to tell the story of his strange life 
in words that are '' half battles,^' are you not acquiring 
something of inestimable value to you in the same 
struggle of which they speak? And not only the 
history of men, but the history of things has its de- 
mands on you. This mighty development of science, 
the new facts that are constantly coming to light as 
to the way in which God has wrought on the earth, 
the kaleidoscopic changes from cycle to cycle, as the 
master hand turned the great combinations of atoms, — 
all this is a knowledge which none of us can ever mas- 
ter, and yet which we all pant to grasp. Your mind is 
an Athenian, eagerly demanding something new, and 
you can't safely refuse it at least an entrance upon such 
themes without dwarfing it. However much you may 
read on other branches, still you must find time to read 
something here if you want to polish all the diflPerent 
facets of your mind. In spite of inclinations or diffi- 
culties, the cry of the mind is that which Browning 
has expressed, — 

" Let me know all : Prate not of most or least, 
Painful or easy.'* 

And then there is another great realm which the 
soul puts under tribute besides that of facts, and that 
is where the imagination seeks its food. Beyond the 



READING, 93 

things which are seen and felt there has been created, 
in the providence of God, a mighty and ever-expanding 
world of images and dreams. There the Poet leads us 
and the Novelist waves his wand to conjure up unreal 
and yet real characters. Every man ought to feed the 
instructive demands of his nature for this kind of 
reading. Every man ought, some time in his life, to 
take hold of his VirgiPs hand, as Dante did, and get 
out from the turmoil and petty passions of men into 
the regions of contemplative peace and rest which the 
imagination creates. The friction of life is so hard, 
we are so blinded and deafened and lost amid the 
whirl and dust of daily struggles, that to take up a 
good novel or a good poem is like getting into the 
green woods after the day in the city. Poetry and 
fiction must enter into the nourishment you give your 
mind, or else those powers of the mind which appro- 
priate and assimilate them by the decree of God will 
wither and shrink. 

And over the twin worlds of fact and imagination 
there rises that faculty of the mind which we may call 
the reasoning faculty, which puts fact to fact and image 
to image, and draws from them truths by which men 
live. All that literature which teaches you how to 
think correctly, which instructs you how to use the 
tools of your mind, ought to be read and studied. A 
shoemaker will do better work with a few tools than 
you or I could do on the best furnished bench on 
which shoemaker ever sat. And to learn how to 
reason is as difficult and demands as much apprentice- 
ship as to learn shoemaking or type-setting. 



94 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

And yet this art of reasoning is the one which dif- 
ferentiates us from all other animals, and you expand 
the space between you and them just in proportion as 
you acquire this art. Then in this diversity of mental 
appetites I must not forget one other which dominates 
them all, — as it finds its source in them all, — and that 
is the religious instinct. If you neglect this you are 
starving yourself, even if you feed every other faculty 
to repletion. I make this a separate department of the 
mental structure because of its importance, although 
its life strikes down into reason and imagination and 
perception. 

But you say, " How can I read over this great field ? 
How can I begin to do so V^ 

I do not say you must read it over, but that you 
shall so diversify your reading as to know something 
of each branch. If you have a special line of profes- 
sional study, — as every man ought to have, — some one 
branch in which you strive to be a master, it cannot be 
expected that you should scatter your powers over 
many. But the mind that never leaves one single 
phase of phenomena, which works on and on in its 
own special line without ever stopping to look outside 
and see the relation which it bears to others, may be- 
come proficient, but it will be narrow and wrong in its 
conclusions. We speak of the mind as a unit, and so 
it is, but it may be abnormally developed on one^side 
to the deforming of the whole, and it is a pernicious 
kind of reading which is never varied. Even ser- 
mons, that are supposed to be as good reading as any 
other, would be detrimental to the mind if they were 



READING. 95 

the only food it received, and I imagine that that kind 
of literature is not the most extensively consumed. 
You cannot be a master in many branches. The 
Leonardo Da Yincis are very few among men. But 
you can keep all your brain powers alive by such gen- 
eral and diversified reading as will furnish something 
for each. It is astonishing how long a mental function 
will live on little food. Some men have never read a 
poem from the days when they were children. John 
Calvin, writing from the splendid panorama under the 
Alps, has not an image or figure in all his volumes. 
And yet such minds at times recur to those early 
impressions. Like hibernating animals, they wake 
up at last to the fact that the meal of long ago has 
been used up and must be repeated. Diversify your 
reading. 

Get the best books in these main branches, and read 
them as you can. There are synopses of history ; there 
are compendiums of scientific research ; there are small 
treatises on mental philosophy. A little time will ac- 
complish much, and you will be astonished at the rapid 
way in which your mind will spread into symmetry. 
We all meet people who are like the one described 
by Dr. Johnson : " People of one idea, and that one 
wrong.^^ And the reason is very apparent. They 
have pierced the crust of knowledge at one place, and 
have been so contracted and narrow in their search 
that they have lost their bearings, and are digging on 
without the slightest conception of trend or object. 
Whatever you are reading steadily, you will master it 
better and see how it fits into the mosaic of human 



96 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

interests and possibilities if you lay it aside at intervals 
for a different literature. 

2. Another great canon which may be laid down 
absolutely is that your reading must be pure. Good 
blood is made from good food^ and the mind makes the 
same demand. Here is one of the especial evils of our 
day^ the vast quantity of tainted and vicious reading 
which is put before us. When Milton put out his 
'^ Areopagitica, or Defence of a Free Press/^ he had to 
submit it to a censor and receive his imprimatur before 
he could lay it at the door of the public. 

Now every printing-press in America may freely 
issue its publications w^ithout censorship of any kind. 
Young men have books and papers sent them, ap- 
parently dropping out of the air, so mysterious is their 
origin, which are filled with corruption and depravity. 
The streets are lined with bulletin-boards on which are 
displayed the worst pictures of the worst vices. Young 
women's seminaries are invaded by circulars and pam- 
phlets. No man can say what the daily mail shall 
bring into his house. Side by side with loving letters 
and invigorating thought there may be left, in delicate 
wrapper, a fearful engine of death, — a more potent 
enemy to peace and character than fated Troy found 
in the bowels of the wooden horse. Any man fresh 
from the penitentiary, who would not be trusted with 
a spoon or a piece of furniture, who w^ould not be tol- 
erated as a candidate for constable, may set up a press, 
if he has enough money, and become a teacher of the 
vices by which he lives. 

The great stream of thought which once flowed pure 



READING, 97 

and healthful, and brought life to those who drank 
from it, is every day receiving more and more polluted 
tributaries, and becoming more unfit for indiscriminate 
use. The great cities which pollute the rivers and 
poison the people who live on their banks below are 
doing the same thing to the rivers of literary life. 
From this city are filthy sewers of thought emptying 
out. There are small offices from which issue more 
enduring poisons into the world of literature than the 
great Cloaca of ancient Eome has ever poured into the 
Tiber. There are unknown men in every city from 
whose pen nothing pure ever drops, and w^hose in- 
fluence is greater than that of the Emersons and Car- 
lyles. It is time that the public should arouse them- 
selves and crush out this fearful traffic. It is time 
that a false modesty should perish and plain words be 
used to the young people who find this reading thick 
as autumn leaves about them. 

The Society for Suppressing Vice has undertaken 
the work of exposing and punishing the manufacturers 
of these poisons, but they have been appalled at the 
magnitude of the evil. 

In one case where the society prosecuted a publisher 
of obscene books, it ^yas proven that in three years he 
had sent out the enormous number of one million three 
hundred and fifty thousand circulars addressed to that 
number of individuals throughout the country. What 
an organization is shown by this fact ! What a net- 
work is cast over the land when one man can get 

so many addresses, and make money from so many 
sources ! 



98 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

The last report of this society speaks almost de- 
spondingly. " The evil we combat is a systemized 
business. Books and pictures which excite the pas- 
sions . . . are among the agencies employed, and 
which it is the object of this society to eradicate and 
destroy. Add to these the foul ravings and obscene 
blasphemy of men lost to manly thoughts or principles, 
w^hose highest ambition is to publish something that 
shall shock the moral sensibility of all decent people, 
— much of this latter finding vent through low, vicious 
sheets, printed expressly for boys, — and then some tol- 
erable conception can be formed of the work to which 
our energies are given." Last year this society seized 
and destroyed over twenty-one thousand pounds of 
obscene books and letter-press, over two hundred thou- 
sand bad pictures, and nearly a quarter of a million 
obscene circulars and songs. And yet this is scarcely 
paring the finger-nail of this colossal evil. It is a 
mere hand held out to catch the waters of a drenching 
storm. I speak to you, young men, to throw the 
weight of your life and influence against the fierce de- 
mand for this poisonous literature. Have nothing to 
do with it in any shape. Refuse to read it. Turn 
away from it as from the leprosy, as you would from 
one on whom the red plague-spot begins to flush and 
burn. With all the diversity of your reading, shun 
this as inimical to every function of your mind and 
soul. Like the miner and sapper, it will eat out the 
foundations on which your life rests, and be most 
dangerous when it seems most peaceful. 

The artists of old used to say, "If you would acquire 



READING. 99 

grace, go and study the creations of Phidias." Perhaps 
it is true, as is said, that those who stand before the Bel- 
vedere Apollo unconsciously assume a noble attitude. 
The ideal man before them is so grand that by the mere 
force of imitation they strive to be like him. 

St. John expresses the same thought when he says that 
w^e shall be '' like Jesus, because we shall see him as he 
is." Well, apply this thought in the other direction. 

Keep yourself constantly before the ideal creature 
of these depraved and licentious writers. Let your soul 
take for its study and its companion the deified passions 
and lusts. Let the marble beauties of Apollo disappear, 
and in their place the bestial image of a bestial god 
ascend the altar, and you are on a lower plane than 
Caligula stood when he raised his horse to the honors 
of his God. You will grow depraved by necessity. 
He who loves the company of the scavenger soon loves 
the filth where the scavenger is, and just as surely as 
you acquire a taste for this impure reading you will sink 
to the level of your instincts, where the beasts are your 
fellow^s. Other reading will pall upon you. Higher 
faculties will wither, lower ones grow, and before you 
know it the virus has permeated your system, your 
thoughts begin to show themselves through your actions 
and words, and you find yourself relegated to the so- 
ciety where you can speak freely and without disguise. 

Walpole, who was too much of a politician to be 
much of a man, used to say that at his dinner-parties 
he always introduced obscene conversation, because 
every one present could participate in that, while every 
other subject would shut some one off. That is the 



100 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

very principle wliich makes the different circles of con- 
versation, from the knot of gamblers or horse-jockeys 
up to the circle of savants and ladies. Like seeks like. 
Affinities of thought make companionships. ^^ Speak, 
that I may know thee,'^ said Ben Jonson. Begin to 
saturate yourself with this infamous literature of the 
slums and brothels, and you will gradually drop from 
circle to circle, as each detects your changing voice in- 
harmonious with its own, until you rest in the company 
of the slums and brothels. For your real life is in your 
thoughts. What a man thinks, that he is. I sometimes 
think it is the most difScult thing in the world to im- 
press on the young man a truth which all experience 
emphasizes, — that you cannot w^ash away moral filth as 
you can wash your hands. Whatever the mind takes 
in it seizes and holds with a remorseless grasp. It takes 
it into its tissue and life, it works it up as an element 
in the man that is to be. You may forget it in details, 
just as you cannot see the alloy in the gold coin, and 
yet it is all there in its effects and essence. Your char- 
acter is gradually forming itself every moment by the 
correlated forces which exist in and about it. It is 
the resultant of many causes, and it will bear the marks 
of every cause forever. Now you read a vile book or 
paper wnth your door locked and. say to yourself, "It 
is only for to-day, this will be forgotten to-morrow. I 
shall be no worse for it.'^ But you are putting an in- 
eradicable stain on an imperishable fabric. You are 
making an image on the silver plate of your soul, in 
that one moment, which may be hidden and undeveloped 
in the camera for years. But some day the outer pall 



READING, 101 

shall drop off, the revealing light of another day shall 
strike in on that seemingly empty plate, and there shall 
come out boldly and distinctly, and without a line ob- 
scured, the long-forgotten impression of that day and 
hour. You remember the story that Hawthorne wrote 
to emphasize this truth. The old doctor had a daughter 
of marvellous beauty, but she carried a fearful mark on 
her cheek. With potent drugs he sought to draw that 
ugly defacement off. Little by little it disappeared. 
Slowly it retreated from the sight, and at last the beau- 
tiful creature lay before him unmarked, but dead. The 
stain was on the soul, and they departed together. It 
is not in the alchemy of man to cleanse the secret stains 
upon the inner life. You cannot kill a thought. 
Whether good or bad, it has entered on immortality. 
To stamp out a sunbeam is beyond your power. To 
use it either in growing roses or developing batrachian 
life buried in swamp marshes is left to you. By pure 
reading you may have pure thoughts, and by pure 
thoughts you may reach up to the manhood that God 
intended you to reach. By licentious and impure read- 
ing you will have impure thoughts, and by impure 
thoughts you must sink into the brute life from which 
He would rescue you. 

And then, besides its subjective effect in weakening 
your own moral sense, it wipes out every pure and 
sweet ideal by which your life has ever been inspired. 
Instead of being raised from the plane of hard, morti- 
fying facts nearer and nearer to the ideal manhood 
where every virtue is found, you drag down that man- 
hood and cynically cut away from it everything that 

9^ 



102 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

you have venerated before. It is one of the sweet re- 
sults of God's arrangement in setting us in families 
that the mind of the boy is made to contemplate the 
one woman whom he sees every day with all the love 
and respect which his soul permits. Womanhood is 
represented to him in his mother. Except in extraor- 
dinary cases, therefore, womanhood is to him everything 
pure and sweet. But the effect of this immoral litera- 
ture is to ostracize that idea, and to make him question 
the virtue and honor of every woman he meets. A 
pure, sweet girl is as bad in heart as the ones he reads 
about. He judges all by the same standard himself, 
and sneers at any pretense to modesty and innocence. 
The very mother who loves and idolizes him, who 
never dreams that he has changed from the sweet child 
that nestled on her bosom, passes under his universal 
contempt for woman's character. 

*^ She raises a mortal to the skies, 
He drags an angel down.'' 

Human nature always presents itself to such a dis- 
eased mind at an angle which lightens the worse and 
shades the best points. 

For the man, who in his conception stands for the 
race, will do anything for his own gratification. Honor, 
virtue, friendship, religion are only the green withes 
of sentiment, to be snapped when the strong man will. 
They bind only fools and weaklings. Have you got 
into that fearful condition where in your secret heart 
you question everything and everybody that claims to 
be good ? I can make all the stars of heaven shake if 



READING. 103 

I shake the glass through which I see them^ and you 
can so deceive yourself as to believe that it is human 
nature that universally wears the ugly shapes which 
your jaundiced eyes create. Juvenal had not a high 
conception of the good in man, and yet he saw how 
prone we are to neglect the better part of that nature 
and dwell on the worse. 

*' And there's a lust in man no charm can tame, 
Of loudly publishing our neighbor's shame ; 
On eagle's wings immortal scandals fly, 
While virtuous actions are but born and die.*^ 

If you are in such a state that you believe every man 
to be a villain at heart, and every woman to be a hag- 
gler for her price, ask yourself whence you derived 
such a morbid thought, and I think you will have to 
answer that it came from the books and papers that 
you have read. It did not spring from pure and 
healthy reflections on human nature. You never got 
it from reading in the Gospels of the perfect manhood 
of which our powers are capable. You did not get it 
from poet or thinker, for they love to dwell on higher 
ranges of the soul, but you got it from pages that re- 
flected a bad and brutish soul, and. Narcissus-like, you 
fell in love with your own self imaged there. Turn 
away from such pages. Put in their place finer con- 
ceptions of Man — Hyperion for a satyr. 

How fearful it is to hear a young man in whom trust 
and confidence ought to be just opening into their flower 
speak harshly and sneeringly of every person he meets. 
Silenus at seventy is a spectacle, but at thirty he is a 
monster. 



104 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

Look for the better characteristics of those about you, 
fling away every page that tells you to despise the vir- 
tues which once you loved, which crucifies and kills the 
ideal man, the embodiment of all that is God-like in us, 
which has done its perfect work only when it has hurled 
you into that chasm which yawns between man and the 
conscienceless animals. And on the other hand fill up 
your memory with more beautiful images. Read such 
books as make you proud that you are a man. With 
careful hand begin to train the powers which you share 
with the heroes of the world. With unsparing hand 
begin to root out the vices which every man who treads 
the penitentiary corridors shares with you. Dwell on the 
histories of human struggles. Study out the problem 
of weakness growing into strength. Go to the pages 
where Augustine's story is told, and learn how much 
may be done by a Monica's love even for a debauched 
and fallen man. Read everything that tends to exalt 
you, that raises your reverence for unseen virtues. And 
above all study manhood where it is at its best, where 
it is portrayed as blameless and perfect in the human 
life of the Man of Nazareth. In its combinations of 
force with gentleness, of intense conviction with infinite 
charity, how high that Gospel life rises above every 
other that man has sought to picture ! We love Sir 
Roger de Coverley when Addison and Steele show him 
to us ; we respect the noble manhood of Sir Charles 
Grandison when Richardson tries to paint a perfect 
man ; we can even cry over the splendid benevolence 
of the Cheeryble Brothers. All such moral portraiture 
is for your study and imitation, but above them all, 



READING. 105 

different from them all, as the sea has in it the mingled 
streams of all the rivers, is the Manhood in the Gospel 
history. Read that story again and again, fill your 
mind with the incidents narrated there, and it will not 
be long before the currents of your being set toward 
Him. It will not be long before you begin to loathe 
the things you loved. In RaphaeFs great picture of 
the Transfiguration the eye falls at once on human na- 
ture at its highest and lowest points. On the summit 
Man is touching God, at the bottom Man is possessed 
of a devil. 

Take either for your model and you may grow like 
it. You may remain tormented in the valley, or you 
may ascend the slopes of the hill where the celestial 
glories are, but those glories must be within you. The 
blind Milton knew what the transfiguring light was, — 

'' He that has light within his own clear breast 
May sit in the centre and enjoy bright day ; 
But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts, 
Benighted walks under the mid-day sun." 

I have not sought to influence your judgment. I 
am sure you all know what I have said is true. But 
I have sought to influence your will, to stir you up to 
act on that you believe to be right. If I had desired 
to argue with you I should not have forgotten to dwell 
on the other side of the question, and show you that 
bad reading cannot benefit you in any way, even the 
slightest. While it is sure to corrupt, weaken, and kill 
the best powers that you have, it gives no compensations, 
not even momentary pleasure. It is not like the beatific 



106 DAXGERS AND DUTIES, 

murder of opium, which opens heaven with one hand 
while it is preparing hell with the other ; it is not like 
the exhilaration of wine, which crushes remorse in ec- 
stasy, but it is the unpleasant drugging of ether, which 
disgusts and offends even while it is shutting out the 
oxygen from the life-blood and numbing the brain. 
The only way for you to act is to resolve never again 
from any motive to read what you know is bad. Make 
this resolution and adhere to it, and no man can say 
what you may not do for yourself. You will certainly 
begin a career grander than any limited by mortality, 
for you will begin to live by the power of an endless 
life, for as you grow more and more in purity of spirit, 
you will be moving nearer to that goal of human as- 
pirations, when with the ^^ pure in heart you shall see 
God.^' 



HABITS. 

The words habit and custom have each a primary- 
reference to the outward dress. A man's habit is that 
which he wears, a man's custom is his costume. From 
this first sense there is the derived one, which is com- 
monly understood, of any regular course of action, any- 
daily law of procedure, into which he allows himself to 
grow, and w^hich he wears as naturally as his clothes. 

As in the primary use of the word the natural body 
is as much a habit or dress of the soul as is the second 
wrapping of cloth, so in the derived sense that which 
we call nature is only a first habit which we overlay 
and conceal wdth others. Habit is our second nature, 
or third, or fourth, as it may be. The habits of the 
infant are supplanted by those of the child, those of 
the child by those of the boy, and so on through the 
different phases of advancing years, until at length we 
all resign ourselves to the uniform habit of death. But 
while we are all creatures of habit, it is certainly clear 
that every man may determine his habits for himself, — 
he may say whether he will do to-day just what he did 
yesterday or not. He may to a certain extent follow 
or reject the precedents of his life, and say whether a 
custom is most honored in keeping or breaking it. In 
fact, this is the very spot where the struggle of life is to 
be most violent. This is the irrepressible slave-war of 

107 



108 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

humanity, wliere every man has to subdue or be sub- 
dued by his own nature. The struggle of the Helots, 
from which Greece could not escape ; the struggle of 
the slaves, from which Rome could not escape; the 
struggle of servile classes to become masters, in every 
nation and age, typifies the greater conflict, from which 
no human being can escape, between lower and higher 
instincts of the soul, between the reason, which is the 
anointed king, and the passions which ought to be, and 
were not content to be, its subjects. 

Perhaps it might be put yet more strongly than that, 
for as the judgment matures slowly and the passions 
are mature at the beginning, the struggle is one where 
the slaves are really in possession, and the king, reason, 
is fighting to reconquer his own. The growth of a 
habit, either good or bad, is so slow and imperceptible 
that it binds a man without his knowledge. You re- 
member when Gulliver was asleep in Liliput, the 
thongs with which his little enemies bound him were 
mere hairs, any one of which was nothing, but a thou- 
sand of them woven over him, strand by strand, though 
too light in touch to arouse him, were strong enough 
to keep him prostrate. So it is that we find ourselves 
the slaves of habit. Without apprehending it the same 
thing is done over and over again, until that which 
seemed a trifle, governed by the will, becomes a neces- 
sity, from which the will cannot free us. Now I cannot 
begin to touch on the vast subject of bad habits to- 
night. I can only take two or three heads and group 
under them some general thoughts. 

1. First, take the habit of selfishness. What a tre- 



HABITS, 109 

mendous word that is^ and how much it holds ! Some 
words are mere canoes, which tip over with more than 
one meaning, and others are like arks, in which you 
may find specimens of everything under heaven. This 
w^ord '' selfishness^^ is big enough to embrace every bad 
and creeping thing in human nature. There is nothing 
that is unnoble and base and unmanly that does not 
seem in some way to find itself naturally at home in 
this word ^^ selfishness.'^ It is vastly different from 
self-love, which is the energy in all nobility of char- 
acter, which is the divine discontent with our surround- 
ings as too small and poor for so great a nature, and 
refuses in any state in which it finds itself therewith 
to be content as a finality when God is calling it to 
better and higher planes. It is vastly different from 
the self-love which a man feels when he contemplates 
the possibilities in him, and contrasts what he is with 
what he hopes to be, for that is the quality by which 
the savage has grown into the gentleman, the unlettered 
nomad into the learned scholar, the rudiments of bar- 
barism into the perfection of civilization, the bestiality 
of Hottentots into the spirituality of Leighton or F6n- 
elon. That is a habit which consecrates and crowns; 
that is a habit which bids men rise above ordinary 
human rew^ards and titles, making them, like the Puri- 
tans of whom Macaulay speaks, nobles by the right 
of earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a 
mightier hand. 

But it is the selfishness w^hich makes the universe 
swing on the pivot of your little soul ; which puts all 
human interests in one scale and your smallest inclina- 

10 



110 * DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

tion in the other ; which erects self — not a possibility, 
but an actuality — into God, and bids the world come and 
worship ; which kills in you all humility and ambition 
alike. That is a habit which is so despicable that you 
ought to struggle to throw off every thread and stitch 
of it. It confuses your perceptions of the right rela- 
tions of things about you. You become gradually dis- 
cordant, both with God and man. Your conception of 
God depends on His gifts to you. Millions may perish 
of famine in China, but you do not care so long as your 
dinner is always ready. The slightest pain or hardship, 
though they may spring from causes which make thou- 
sands happy, occasion doubts in you as to the goodness 
of God. A toothache of yours occupies a larger field 
in the government of God than famines or pestilences. 
You want comfort from Him, but it is a comfort that 
stops with you, not one which makes you able to com- 
fort others wdth the comfort wherewith you are com- 
forted of God. You want blessings, but only for 
yourself. Your religion is one of gradually hardening 
selfishness, a mere personal chance of escape. Why do 
I say your religion, when religion is a product of love 
and necessity, not of arrogant calculation and hypoc- 
risy ? But if we analyze many of our prayers which 
are made in our retirement, what are they but selfish 
desires which we should despise God for answering in 
the sense we intend ? They do not come from hearts 
where large and generous impulses are born, where the 
pity for human sufferings and sympathy with others' 
troubles are blended with the mighty emotions of our 
nearer life. The very essence of religion is unselfish- 



HABITS. Ill 

ness, — ^tlie breaking down of the narrowing wall around 
us and melting ourselves into the great sea of human 
interests and human hopes. To be selfish, then, kills 
true religion. It leaves nothing of Golgotha but a 
barren, skull-shaped mound, stripping it of the splendid 
light which streamed from the unselfish death of the 
ideal man. It cuts out the nerve of the ideal prayer 
which begins " Our Father,^^ expressing the common 
brotherhood and dependence of mankind. 

And as it is in relation to God, so it is to man : sel- 
fishness twists us into ugly shapes. We so magnify 
ourselves and dwarf others that we lose judgment. As 
they shrink we grow until there seems to be a distance 
between us that is only an imagination, but yet affects 
all our actions and thoughts, so that to others we are 
absurd and ridiculous. They feel towards us just as 
we feel towards the child who thinks the chair and the 
moon are equally near to him. 

In speaking to young men, these words on selfishness 
are especially demanded, because the circumstances of 
your life are most apt to encourage it. While you are 
living at home, with a mother and sisters, it is very 
natural that they should do a great many things for you, 
small in themselves and yet necessary, which you can- 
not return in kind. Now, if you begin to look on these 
things as a sort of tribute paid to your superior position 
as a man, if you condescendingly receive their offers to 
sew on a button, or clean up your room, or do anything 
by which your life is made happier, why, then you have 
the first element of selfishness, which is thoughtlessness. 
You forget that it is harder to do these little menial 



112 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

offices, even for those we love, than it is to do some 
mucli greater things. And if after months of such 
favors you sometimes say, " Don't you want to go to 
the theatre or the concert with me?'^ you make a vast 
mistake if you think this is a receipt in full for all that 
has been done. 

The hard things of life are the little things of per- 
sonal trouble and effort, and I advise you to look very 
carefully into your life and see if you are allowing the 
love which your mother and sisters pour on you to 
blind you to your real position towards them, for 
this is the very school in which so many men are inca- 
pacitated for intercourse with men at large. You as- 
sume a superior tone at home, you learn to pity and 
then despise those who know nothing about the politics 
or business or sports of the day. Your family meekly, 
from the love they bear you, submit to this, and are, if 
anything, pleased to think you so much better posted 
than they are, and then when you are thrown among 
men who don't care a copper about you, it takes some 
time and much sense to root out the superciliousness 
and arrogance which they will not stand. Many a man 
of fine parts and good education has had to regret bit- 
terly the way in which he received the sweetest and 
tenderest offices which earth shall ever give him. The 
recollection of his younger days, when pure and disin- 
terested love was coaxing all his powers into life, when 
the slightest success was crowned and applauded by the 
proud circle of his home, when his every word was 
treasured as an oracle, becomes bitter when he thinks 
how selfishly he took it all, how small he really was 



HABITS. 113 

compared with the great loves that wasted themselves 
upon him, and how narrow and unsympathetic his own 
soul was. It is a very trying time of life. Everything 
inside and outside conspires to delude you into the be- 
lief that you are a little better than any one else, and 
to make you grow into a habit of selfish exaction. 
The real power of your life will show itself just in 
proportion as you learn to imitate, not enslave, this 
motherly and sisterly spirit of self-sacrifice. Take it 
as your model. Exert yourself to be a helping and 
loving member of the family. Share your thoughts 
and life with them. Begin a life of general usefulness 
by bringing sunshine with you from your outer to your 
inner life. When you go home from business, or school, 
or amusements, get pleasanter, not duller, as you near 
the house. You and I could go among our friends and 
pick out some who regard their home as a sulking-place. 
Outside they are genial enough, but when they get home 
they are peevish and irritable and selfish. When they 
dine out, if the steak isn't just right, they have a smile 
and a pleasant word, which lifts the weight from the 
heart of the host ; but let the same thing occur at home, 
and our friend will express himself to mother, or sister, 
or wife in a way that would earn him a beating any- 
w^here else. Have you some friend who has a home of 
his own, where he takes you once in a while and lets 
you see him in the little inner world where he is absolute 
ruler ? Study him. Is he thoughtful and courteous 
and scrupulously polite to those whose life is tied to his ? 
Does he exert himself as much to please his wife or 
sisters as he would any lady anywhere ? Then he is 
h 10^ 



114 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

a gentleman to the soul, — one after the stamp of 
Bayard and not of Chesterfield, — who is gentle not be- 
cause society demands it and it pays, but because his 
heart demands it and it is natural. Or is he one who 
likes to show his authority, who apologizes for every- 
thing that his wife says or does, who is constantly cor- 
recting or silencing her, who astonishes you by the vast 
change in his conduct since last evening, when you saw 
him so polite and gentlemanly at somebody's party? 
Why, then he is a veneered gentleman, a pinchbeck 
article, and selfishness is the base metal underneath. 
Everything he does may be explained by that one 
motive, — self; and he plays the gentleman in society 
only for the benefit he derives from the character. But 
you know very well which of these two kinds of men 
is the one that you respect the most and which you wish 
to be like. Think which one you are most like now, so 
far as you are like either, and you may find that with 
all your disgust for the brutality of the selfish man, 
you are already developing the germs of that same 
character. Habits grow slowly. They are not the 
small cloud in the morning and the sky-concealing 
storm at noon, but they are the acorn which a child can 
crush maturing through years of struggle into the gi- 
gantic oak which overshadows and dwarfs the strength 
of man. You will have to watch yourself; you will 
have to go through your nature as a man does through 
his garden, and see what strange seeds are putting forth 
their life. The struggle of life is to keep our hearts 
large and growing, to find room in them for an in- 
creasing number of affections and loves ; to beat back 



HABITS. 115 

the world which tries to crowd us into a narrower life, 
and to welcome the world which draws out of self into 
a broader and grander life. In a w^ord, it is just Avhat 
the Saviour meant when He said that those who are 
willing to give up their life shall find it. They who 
are willing to sacrifice the things which most minister 
to their ease and comfort, — to be unselfish in the highest 
sense, — are the ones who find newer joys and comforts 
of which they had not dreamed ; who gain a life infi- 
nitely higher than that they lose. Jean Jacques Eous- 
seau tells us in his Confessions that at an early age he 
felt a strange sensation Avithin him like the bursting of 
a great blood-vessel, the effects of which were so violent 
and painful that he was convinced his life could not 
last very long. But so far was he from becoming 
lethargic and indolent under this fear that he only 
began to live when he thought he was about to die. 
The sense of a shortened life intensified his desire to 
work while he could. It is a blessed thing when a 
young man is startled out of a quiet, contented life of 
selfish ease and comfort and made to feel that if he is 
to do anything worth doing it requires an energetic and 
painful struggle, and that he was never so happy as 
when he thought himself just about to be miserable, 
and that he was never so truly alive as when he began 
to die to everything that he was before. 

INTEMPERANCE. 

2. Then, leaving this habit of selfishness, on which 
we have scarcely touched, let us think together of the 
equally great habit of intemperance. Now, this word 



116 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

IS one of those which have been taken out of their gen- 
eral meaning and narrowed into a special sense. Every- 
one of you, I do not doubt, immediately thought I was 
about to speak of the habit of drinking ; and yet that 
is only one direction into which intemperance may run. 
Anywhere that we strike out from the even circle of 
life and permit any appetite to develop itself dispro- 
portionately we are intemperate in that appetite. And 
different men have different habits. Some are intem- 
perate in their eating, some in drinking, some in talk- 
ing, some in silence. To be intemperate is to be uneven 
in the exercise of different powers. Some people who 
are most violent against what they call intemperance, 
are people who do not know what temperance means. 
They shudder at the thought of wine or spirits, but 
they are under a constant intoxication of tea or coffee, 
or tobacco, or pride, or envy, or uncharitableness, or 
avarice, or meanness. 

I confess I cannot regard him as a true apostle of 
reform who denounces even a thimbleful of liquor and 
then drinks a dozen cups of strong black tea. He does 
not seem to have acquired the first conception of tem- 
perance, which is equability of life, — due use, without 
abuse, of all proper appetites. Whether you shall drink 
any wine or beer is for you yourself to determine, and 
in the great majority of cases, if not in all, I make no 
doubt, you will be better without it. But it is a ques- 
tion for the physician to advise upon sometimes. But 
if you do make up your mind, on principle, to abstain 
totally from all such intoxicants, let me give you two 
words of advice. In the first place, don^t allow your- 



HABITS. 117 

self to put any other vice in their stead as a sort of 
compensation, deforming yourself on one side while 
you are comely on the other. Give them up entirely, 
and don't depend on any kind of stimulants. And, in 
the second place, don't be always making a merit of 
your abstinence and pitying those who do not agree 
with you. To be drunk with self-esteem offends as 
much as any other drunkenness, and if there is any- 
thing more disgusting than a poor, drivelling whiskey- 
sot it is his antithesis, the man who is found in every 
social gathering, swelling with conceit and telling every- 
body intemperately how temperate he is. 

There may be no more credit due you for abstaining 
than there is to another man for not abstaining. But 
whatever your conscience tells you to do, do it like a 
man : firmly, unostentatiously, and sensibly, for con- 
science^ sake. But I want to take this splendid word 
^^ temperance" out of the little groove in which it has 
been made to run and give it to you to-night as the 
"open sesame'^ of a real manly life. Behind that word, 
as a symbol, lies the power by which you may remove 
every excrescence and round yourself into fulness and 
symmetry. You see, from the very nature of the word, 
a habit is that which a man wears. He ought to con- 
trol it, not it him. Ask yourself, with regard to your 
own habits, now, whether it is true that they are obe- 
dient to your will or not. Do you smoke because you 
like to or because you have to ? Do you drink because 
you need it, or because it is the time you drank yester- 
day and many yesterdays? Do you interlard your 
conversation with oaths to give it strength and intensity, 



118 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

or do you use them unwittingly and spontaneously? 
Are you trying to make a fortune honestly and de- 
cently, or are you fiercely, intemperately rushing here 
and there in the fierce struggle, determined to put 
money in your purse by any means ? Do you make 
your sports and amusements rational pauses from labor, 
or are they pushed beyond that into intemperate indul- 
gence ? The answer to all these questions, and dozens 
more like them, determines whether you are a tem- 
perate man or not. In a turning-factory you may see 
on one side of the lathe a rough piece of timber. Angu- 
lar, dirty, unsightly, uneven, see the turner take it up 
and push it into the lathe and throw it down on the 
other side clean, rounded, and smooth. There is your 
model. Take up your life and you will find it a very 
uneven one ; you may be happy if it is not a very un- 
clean and unsightly one for you to contemplate. It is 
for you to see that its angularity is removed ; that a 
habit is pared away here and removed entirely there, 
and that the whole surface of your life is polished and 
beautified. How that can be done, and what you need 
to do, you must find out for yourself. No one knows 
where your habits are strongest and worst but yourself. 
No one know^s the hold they have on you, and it is 
very possible that you do not know that yourself unless 
you have tried to resist them. But there you find the 
battle-field of your life ; there you enter into the twin 
mysteries of the conscience and the will. 

Most of us keep up a sort of a skirmish, neither con- 
quering nor conquered entirely. We do not, on the one 
hand, achieve what we hoped to in breaking down our 



HABITS. 119 

habits of evil ; nor do we, on the other, succumb entirely 
to them. We enter into a sort of truce which is pleas- 
ant but apt to be dangerous. The hard fighting man- 
hood ought to cry, with Tennyson, — 

" Make me feel the wild pulsation that I felt before the strife, 
When I heard my days before me and the tumult of my life ; 
Oh, I see the crescent promise of my spirit has not set, 
Ancient founts of inspiration well through all my fancy yet.'' 

Mediocrity is the lot of most of us, but it is never- 
theless the state from which we ought to struggle to 
escape. The conscience sits, like Cato, in the senate of 
the soul, and against every member pleading for an evil 
habit and urging that it can be controlled raises its 
hoarse judgment: "Carthage must be destroy ed.^^ 
Evil habits are all intemperances. There is no peace 
or safety while they exist. Quiet and peaceful they 
may be for a time, but, like the quiet Carthage, they may 
some time send a Hannibal through all the natural 
defences of the soul up to its central citadel. 

If you gather all I would have you from this one 
word " temperance," your mind will turn naturally to 
almost every habit which disfigures humanity, for all 
our passions are but exaggerated emotions. Hate is 
intensified dislike ; fear is caution in extremity ; idola- 
try is love beyond reason ; the emotion of displeasure 
may be lashed into the passion of anger. So, you see, 
to be temperate is to be perfectly free and unhampered 
in the regular exercise of every function of your life. 
It is to keep yourself in equipoise and balance, and the 
elements so mixed in you that you may be called a man 



120 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

by all the world. To control your passions is to control 
a menagerie. Old Archbishop Leighton has put this 
matter very forcibly : 

" What ! you will say, have I beasts within me ? 
Yes, you have, and a vast number of them. Is anger 
an inconsiderable beast when it barks in your heart ? 
What is deceit when it lies in a cunning mind ; is it 
not a fox ? Is not the man who is furiously bent on 
calumny a scorpion? Is not the person who is eagerly 
set on resentment and revenge a venomous viper? 
What do you say of a covetous man ; is he not a raven- 
ous wolf? Nay, there is no wild beast that is not found 
within us. And do you consider yourself as lord and 
prince of the wild beasts because you command those 
that are without, though you never think of subduing 
or setting bounds to those that are within you ? What 
advantage have you by your reason, which enables you 
to overcome lions, if, after all, you are overcome by 
anger ? To what purpose do you rule over the birds 
and catch them with gins, if you yourself, w^ith the in- 
consistency of a bird, are ensnared by pride and brought 
down and caught by pleasure ? But as it is shameful for 
him who rules over nations to be a slave at home, will 
it not be, in like manner, disgraceful for you, who exer- 
cise dominion over the beasts that are without you, to 
be subject to a great many of those of the worst sort 
that roar and domineer in your distempered soul ?'^ 

SENSUALITY. 

3. Under these two heads of selfishness and temper- 
ance I have grouped much of what I have to say, and 



HABITS. 121 

yet there is one more habit which is especially danger- 
ous, because it is an unseen and esoteric one, and that is 
the habit of sensuality. I have spoken in other lectures 
of the effect of immoral amusements and immoral read- 
ing, and it is only necessary for me to mention this sub- 
ject now. But be well assured that any habits which 
you may form that foster and nourish this instinct are 
bad and fatal. The allurements of a great city are 
about you ; you carry your life in your hand. The 
iniquity of man and the depravity of women conspire 
with your own nature to draw you to your destruction. 
Every night some one can tell the story of the old king 
who wrote the Proverbs, and every night it is a new 
and fearful truth, — 

*' For at the window of my house 
I looked through my casement, 
And beheld among the simple ones, 
I discerned among the youths, 
A young man void of understanding, 
Passing through the street near her corner. 
And he went the way to her house, 
In the twilight, in the evening, 
In the black and dark night. 
And behold there met him a woman 
"With the attire of an harlot, and subtle of heart. 
With her much fair speech she caused him to yield ; 
With the flattering of her lips she forced him. 
He goeth after her straightway, as an ox goeth to the slaughter, 
Or as a fool to the correction of the stocks, 
Till a dart strike through his liver. 
As a bird hasteth to the snare, 
And knoweth not that it is for his life. 
Let not thine heart decline to her ways, 
Go not astray in her paths ; 
For she hath cast down many wounded. 

F 11 



122 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

Yea, many strong men have been slain by her. 

Her house is the way to hell, 

Going down to the chambers of death.'* 

I can add nothing to that. Take that picture from 
the streets of old Jerusalem, and you will find it a pic- 
ture of the streets of Cincinnati to-day. 

If there be anything in the voice of your conscience ; 
if there be anything in the sense of an unstained life ; 
if there be anything in the warnings of generations of 
human experience ; if there be anything in the spiritual 
struggles of the soul, they will be found working 
together with all that is good in you to keep you from 
those places which all the world has ever designated by 
the most villainous names. 

I cannot say more than that with propriety ; I could 
not say less with consistency or with a sense of duty. 

And now I have finished this evening's talk to you, 
not, I trust, without some of you finding in it the germs 
of high and noble living. To be unselfish, to be tem- 
perate, to be spiritual and clean, is it not worth fighting 
for and suffering for? To look carefully into your 
nature, as the grape-grower peers in among the green 
leaves of his vines, to see whether there be not some 
false growth there which shall drink up the currents 
of your life and yet be barren themselves, to use the 
painful and yet blessed surgeon's knife when you see 
how far habit has progressed into disease, this is the 
substance of it all. And it is so much easier to tell it 
than it is to do it, that you must not get discouraged if 
you do not succeed in accomplishing instantly that which 
seems so easy. 



HABITS. 123 

In tlie old Norse legends there is a story which tells 
us that Thor went down to visit the realm of the 
giants. Like all the gods of the mythologies, he must 
manifest himself by physical powers. They gave him 
a horn to drink from. With all his efforts he could 
only lower the liquor a little in the cup. They asked 
him to lift a cat from the floor. His utmost strength 
could only arch her back a little. An old woman came 
in to wrestle with him, and the war-god could not 
throw her more than to her knees. Baffled, weary, 
angry, the king turned to go, when they told him that 
they were amazed and terrified at what he had done, 
for the horn was connected with the seas, and he had 
made the oceans shrink ; the cat was the great serpent 
which girdled and held together the whole earth, and 
he had actually lifted the eternal coil; the old hag 
whom he had brought to her knees was Death, whom 
none else could strive with. The old saga has its lesson 
for you and me, for the habits which seem so easy to 
master have a mighty invisible force behind them in 
our nature. We see only their symptoms, their exter- 
nals, and those seem poor and weak. And w^e are sur- 
prised when they do not yield at once. But let us not 
be discouraged. Let us strive as we may with the help 
of God, and remember that a real and not legendary 
Man has fulfilled all that Thor attempted. For it was 
Jesus, the perfect Man, who made the seas obey Him, 
who put His heel upon the head of the great serpent 
and uncoiled his grasp upon the world, who fought with 
Death and conquered it. By Him the power of habits 
may be broken ; by Him weakness may grow into 



124 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

strengtli ; by Him you may learn Avhat St. Paul meant 
when he said he could do all things through Christ, 
who strengthened him; and by Him, and Him only, you 
may learn to solve your life's problem, to " quit you like 
men and be strong/^ Oh, it is in this feeling— that all 
men everywhere have an intense desire to be better than 
they are — that the pulpit has its deepest hold. When 
it speaks of a better life than this ; when it speaks of 
this life being reformed and bettered ; when it tells how 
unsatisfactory and poor are all the pleasures which sin 
yields ; when it tries, even with a broken accent, to de- 
scribe the kind of manhood which is possible for us all 
to approach, it meets a response in every heart. It is the 
eternal prophet of man^s higher nature. Even the man 
who has started out at the call of religion to lead a new 
and manly life finds himself, like Lazarus, bound hand 
and foot and mouth with the habits of corruption. They 
must be unwrapped one by one at the Saviour's com- 
mand : " Loose him and let him go.'^ The powers of 
human nature for good and bad seem so evenly balanced, 
or so preponderant on the side of evil, that Ovid may 
be said to speak for us all when he says, — 

'' I see the better and approve it, 
I follow the worse." 

But we have a helper and a guide of whom Ovid did 
not know, and it is the currents of His life streaming 
down into the wastes and deserts of our nature tliat 
freshen withered virtues and implant the germs of 
others. He has been the inspiration in the grandest 
lives of the sons of men, and everything He has been 



HABITS. 125 

to them He may be to you. As bad as your worst 
habit may be, men have been rescued from it before, 
and will be again ; and there is nothing between your 
cradle and your grave for which you ought to strive 
and pray so hard as to conquer every habit which drives 
you from a throne to wear the collar of a beast. In that 
struggle you need not be alone. Kaulbach has painted 
a great picture where the armies of good and bad are 
warring on the ground, and above them in the air, un- 
seen by them, are the militant spiritual forces. The 
battle goes on eternally, whether men know it or not. 
Fight your fight with a strong reliance on the power of 
God, and He will not fail you. You will be more than 
conqueror at the last. 



11* 



THE IDEAL MANHOOD. 

To those who have an experimental knowledge of the 
young men of to-day, and the life into which they are 
cast, it seems impossible to group in six lectures the 
especial perils of their life. 

If you look simply at this earthly life, with its re- 
wards and punishments, with its pleasures and pains, 
with its wrecks and its successes, the pathway of us all 
is lined with dangers and pitfalls. I have not used 
the title of these lectures in a sensational way. I have 
not used it in any sense but one of deep and earnest con- 
viction that there are fair young lives touching mine 
on every side that are in imminent peril. As the days 
of my ministry whirl away, they register many changes 
among those I know. Nothing but the waters of Lethe 
could obliterate from my memory the splendid promises 
and the brilliant hopes in the lives of many young men 
whom I knew five years ago which have gone down 
forever in stormy seas. 

Some of those young men are buried now where the 
daisies blow over them, and where men forget their 
defects and sins. Some are living a wounded and 
writhing life. Through conscience and soul they 
have driven the spear of Eemorse. They carry it as 
Epaminondas did the barb that pierced his vitals. It 
cannot be withdrawn. They may seem to be the same 

126 



TEE IDEAL MANHOOD, 127 

men to the passer-by, but in their experiences they have 
added a century to their life, in their burdens they have 
piled mountains on their heads. I look back ten years 
to my college life, and find yet more to lament over in 
the history of those I loved then. 

I look about me now, see the young men whose quiet 
lives are nearing the rapids, and in the conviction of 
my duty, in the reality of my affection, in the sworn 
obligation of my holy oflSce, I have raised my voice to 
tell you of those perils which have killed many like 
you. To be young, ardent, trustful, generous is given 
to you now, as you stand on tiptoe, in the dawn of your 
active life, to catch the first beams of the rising possi- 
bilities of a fuller day. But it is in these very quarters 
that your perils lurk. Every fine, manly quality carries 
its own peril in it. The high-strung, impulsive, affec- 
tionate men are the very ones who need the check-rein 
and the voice of warning. Their mettle carries them 
into many a danger from which other men are free. 

But they are the only kind of men worth saving for 
their active influence in the world. In the soil of their 
nature are germinating the seeds of great possibilities 
for good and for bad. They will be powerful in some 
direction. The trend of their life has not yet been 
taken. To save such a man from evil and consecrate 
him to good, to put before him considerations which 
shall make him, in every sense of the word, a power 
for good in life that God has given him among men, 
has been the object of these lectures. I have from the 
first addressed myself to you as young men of a fully 
equipped nature, with all the temptations and all the 



128 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

motives of a sterling character. The fulness of man- 
hood means the fulness of peril. The greatest temp- 
tations are felt by the greatest souls. Because Luther 
had a mightier soul than most men, he had to fight a 
present and visible devil in the Wartburg; because 
our Saviour was a perfect man, He stood up against 
the strongest and most perilous temptations to which 
humanity is subjected. There is a weak and nerveless 
character which exists without any dangers from san- 
guine sins, because it has not the propensities of man- 
hood in it. There are young men of this kind who 
won^t find very much to help them in anything I have 
said. Cold and unsympathetic, they make a table- 
spoonful of blood with great difficulty every day, and 
are economical in using it up. They are prudent to a 
proverb. The maxims of close-fisted thrift, of pachy- 
dermatous selfishness, of cynical contempt were born 
on their lips. With bodies that have not yet seen the 
changes of a quarter-century, they have hearts older 
and drier than the dust of Abraham. They have not 
the ordinary temptations of men because they have not 
the ordinary affections of men. Flabby souls ! The 
simulacra of young men, shining not with the joyous 
and dancing light of an ardent nature, but keeping the 
steady and unearthly gleam of heatless phosphorus. 
You can't make a force out of such a life. It lacks 
energy, reality, motive. Such a man is like the cold 
light that plays in the wake of an ocean steamer. It 
is pretty to look at, it keeps you wondering for hours 
what it is and why it is, but if you draw up a bucket- 
ful of the foam on which it shines you find that you 



THE IDEAL MANHOOD. 129 

coiildn^t strike a spark of living fire from all that 
quivers on seas and oceans. I have not thought it 
worth while to lecture that kind of men. Advice is 
no more necessary to save them from the perils of an 
exuberant and torrid age than tarpaulins are to save 
the icebergs of Nova Zembla from a thaw in January. 
I have not thought of such creatures at all, but have 
spoken directly, freely, and I hope manfully, to young 
men who are reservoirs of powers, affections, and hopes, 
while yet they are destitute of wisdom and experience. 

SINCERITY. 

Under all the ambitions and desires of your life I 
have sought to lay firm and broad the one great prin- 
ciple which underlies the character of a man, and that 
is sincerity. If you have not that, you are not entitled 
to be called a man. To be, and to be conscious of 
being through and through what men esteem you to 
be, honest to the core, to give out a true ring w^henever 
and however you are struck, that is the very first ele- 
ment of true manliness. I would rather be a mullein- 
stalk, and be it through and through an honest stalk, 
as good a stalk inside as out, than to be a swelling and 
spreading oak which men admire until they strike the 
trunk and hear the hollow sound of an empty heart, 
for then I am w^orthless in everything. 

And for my friends, I w^ould rather have men of the 
most ordinary qualifications, if their aflFection be sincere 
and steady, rather than Shaftesburys and Bolingbrokes, 
whose fascinations are equalled only by their duplicity. 
When in a company of young men I listen to one and 



330 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

another, T find myself constantly judging the character 
of each just in the ratio in which he impresses me with 
the quality of sincerity. One may be very brilliant 
and draw my attention by the charms of co-nversation, 
and another may be reticent and embarrassed, and yet 
there may be in him the deeper fascination of a real, 
true soul that draws me to him from the supple-tongued 
and careless man. I do not know anything more im- 
portant to say to you than this. It girds your life. It 
applies to everything you do, or think, or say, or feel. 
If you have told a lie, say so, and get back all the 
manhood you can save to keep you from telling 
another. If you have done a mean thing, and are 
ashamed of it, don't keep that honest shame hidden, 
like an ivy-blossom, where no one can find it without 
hunting and prodding for it, but when the right time 
comes out with it, and bear the pain of your own 
fault. If you have run into debt, and are worried to 
death because your father don't know it and will be 
angry, make him respect you for your frankness, at 
least, and let him hear it from you before he does from 
some one else. You may give him the satisfaction of 
knowing that if he can't rely on you to take care of 
money, he can rely on you to tell the truth like a man. 
Most men would prefer a spendthrift rather than a 
sneak for their son. If you have gotten into an impure 
and filthy mode of speech or thought, don't mollify 
your sore conscience by spreading over it the falsehood 
that all men do the same, and that it does not make 
any difference, but bind a virtue to it by humbly and 
sincerely owning that you are ashamed of it, and mean 



THE IDEAL MANHOOD. 131 

to try and free yourself from it. If you are in the 
habit of drinking a glass of wine or beer or smoking a 
cigar, don^t do it in secret and wrap yourself up in the 
lie of cloves and cologne-water and make people believe 
you never do it. If you think it is unmanly, don't do 
it. If you think it is a manly thing and are not ashamed 
of it, then enjoy it like a man and with men, and don't 
drag it oflF into a corner as a dog takes his bone w^here 
no one can see him. And in your thoughts and con- 
victions there is only one thing which makes them 
yours, and that is the sincerity with which you hold 
them. During the coming summer, while the political 
campaign is going on, you may go to half a dozen 
meetings of either party and you will hear the audience 
shout themselves hoarse over statements which they 
don't understand and which they don't believe, simply 
because it seems to make against the other side. They 
may be sincere Republicans or sincere Democrats, but 
they are not sincere men. They have let the party 
platform get into the place of the conscience, and to 
hear their language you would think that the lines of 
their party included all the virtues and shut out all the 
vices. It is so in every organization where the indi- 
vidual is lost in the clique. The fight about religious 
creeds cannot settle itself in any way but this : that a 
creed may be an excellent thing or it may be a destruc- 
tive thing just in proportion to the sincerity with which 
it is held. When you stood up to-night and said the 
Apostles' Creed, if it expressed the honest convictions 
of your soul, if it brought vividly before your heart 
the sweet and sad story of the Incarnation of the Son 



132 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

of God, tlic suflering and death and resurrection and 
ascension of an actual life, if it made your soul larger, 
while you truly declared your trust in the Holy Ghost, 
your sublime hope of the forgiveness of sins, your 
longing for immortality and your unfaltering faith in 
an everlasting life, then it is a splendid help and sup- 
port in your religious life. If you said it by rote, no 
more sincerely than you would repeat the multiplication 
table as a creed, then to hold on to it year by year, and 
repeat it as you used to when you believed it sincerely, 
is a preposterous and dangerous thing. It is your creed 
only when your soul enters it eagerly and yet finds 
even newer and fresher things in it. The guides at 
Mammoth Cave told me that they had gone into the 
cave a thousand times, and yet each time they saw 
something they had not seen before, and that there are 
vast galleries on which their eyes shall never look. 

Now, the Creed may be like that to you, or it may be 
a mere dry bundle of words. It may be growing larger 
with your life, expanding into vaster proportions, reach- 
ing down into subtler truths, opening new visions of 
sight, so that it becomes the very matrix of sincerity 
where your soul takes its best impressions, or it may be 
as insincere and foreign to your present life as your 
jacket of ten years ago would be. There is a great 
deal said about outgrowing a creed, about getting too 
large for it. But in many of the cases where this ex- 
pression is used, the sincere statement would be that 
the creed no longer fits so well because the man has 
shrunk up in it. He is decidedly smaller and thinner 
than he was ten years ago. His soul has reached that 



THE IDEAL MANHOOD. I33 

period of senility when, like the body, it loses elas- 
ticity, settles on itself, gets too small for its clothes, and 
dwindles into decrepitude. Such a man sees the creases 
in his coat and says, " I have worn this coat out ; it 
doesn't fit like it used to ; it isn't very good stuff, any- 
how, and never was much of a coat;'' and the real fact, 
to which he blinds himself, is that the coat is wearing a 
good deal better than he is, and is a very fair specimen 
of a coat, if he could only put as much man inside of 
it as it was made for and once held. 

Just in the same way some men talk about their 
creed. They think they have outgrown it, and that it 
is only a worn-out and cast-off habit of the soul, when, 
if they look honestly into their life, they will find their 
souls have gradually contracted and dwarfed ; that they 
no longer have the broad, sweet conceptions of God 
and duty which were their fuller and younger nature ; 
that it is the same system of truth which once pulsated 
to its very extremities with the warm currents of their 
nascent faith, and the change has come because the 
heart has grown colder and feebler and can no longer 
fill so large a body with warm and throbbing life. 

And this discussion of creeds and convictions leads 
me from sincerity, the first element of ideal manhood, 
to the second, which is 

TRUTH. 

2. I do not mean truth in the sense of truthfulness, 

which is indistinguishable from sincerity, but I mean 

right thought, a correct standard of belief and action. 

There is growing up among men a very specious and 

dangerous opinion that it doesn't make any difference 

12 



134 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

what a man thinks if he is sincere and honest in that 
belief. But it is very clear that the utmost sincerity is 
consistent with the most dangerous errors. We meet 
men every day who are as honest and fair as we are, 
and yet it is ahnost demonstrable that they are in error. 

The Spanish under Alva were as sincere in their be- 
lief that God was with them when Valenciennes was 
sacked, when Egmont was shot, when hundreds were 
daily carried before the Blood Council, as the Nether- 
landers were in believing He was with them. Every 
line that has ever separated great bodies of men has run 
through the very heart of sincerity and left equal parts 
with each side. The Jews and Jesus, Luther and Eck, 
Richelieu and the Huguenots, Fairfax and Rupert, 
Washington and Howe all stood to do battle for what 
they believed to be right and true. Yet there was a 
right and there was a wrong in every case, and the 
record of each of them is precious or infamous as his 
sincerity was joined with truth and right. Amidst all 
uncertainties, with only one absolute certainty, and that 
one that man never can arrive at all truth, yet the ideal 
manhood is one that keeps its lips ever parted with 
Pilate's question, '^ What is truth ?'^ Our whole life 
gives the lie to the statement that it is immaterial what 
we believe or think. 

There is an unquenchable thirst for truth. Whether 
Lessing and Malebranche were right in saying they 
would choose search after truth rather than the actual 
truth itself we need not discuss, for in either case what 
is affirmed is that no man is content to rest in error. 
Every man is in quest of a Holy Grail, and that is 



THE IDEAL MANHOOD, 135 

absolute truth. We all feel that the knowledge of 
what is right must go before the doing of what is 
right. And so when I come to you, young men, and 
ask you to consider what a manhood you ought to 
strive for, you will see at once that that manhood rests 
on the principles of infallible truth. There is an abso- 
lute duty imposed on you to exercise your reason and 
critically distinguish between the false and the true. 
To have a hap-hazard conception of duty or morals or 
religion, and to let the whole matter drop with some 
platitude about Christ not condemning a man if he is 
honest and sincere, is simply to ignore the reason which 
God has given you to detect right and wrong. The 
ability to reason raises the responsibility for error, and 
you must bring all your mind, and your heart, and 
your soul, and your strength to the testing of the great 
system of belief and duty. The common law which 
expresses man's natural sense of justice will listen to a 
criminal's plea of ignorance as to the facts from which 
his crime issued, but it refuses to hear him plead ig- 
norance as to the principles of right and wrong. It 
will not punish him for a murder done unintentionally 
and without malice, but it will not let its sword-point 
fall before the man-killer who did not know that mur- 
der is a crime. 

Of this principle may be said what Richard Hooker 
has said of law generally, that " Of it no less can be 
said than that its seat is the bosom of God, its voice 
the harmony of the world.'' To use every power of 
your mind, to exert yourself to your utmost to find out 
what is right, to say, with Luther at Worms, when you 



136 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

cannot believe what all around you are urging you to 
believe, *^Hcre I stand. I cannot do otherwise, God 
help me, amen !" is the demand made upon you. And 
although I am not prepared to answer what shall be 
the issue of that man^s life w^ho, after earnest and un- 
ceasing effort to know the right, yet remains in error, 
I am fully prepared to say that the vast majority of 
men do not make earnest and unceasing effort, and that 
error is the result of indifference, and not judgment. 
And the same thing may be said of many persons who 
have arrived at the truth. They are not entitled to 
any credit for it. They have stumbled upon it in the 
dark, and clasped it without seeing it in its beauty. It 
is not theirs in any true sense of the word. They hold 
it just as the Philistines seized the sacred ark with 
vast joy and found that they could not penetrate into 
its mysteries, could not use it in any way, and that it 
brought care and responsibility wdth it. 

Practically, then, the question for you to think over 
is this : Have you done your very best to satisfy your 
mind as to the great questions over which the human 
mind has forever brooded, as God's holy spirit brooded 
over chaotic wastes and brought light and life and 
beauty into being ? Have you any intelligent concep- 
tion in your mind of the origin and destiny of man, of 
God in His relationship to matter and to law, of the 
strange life and death of the Nazarene, who must be so 
much or so little in your own personal life, and who is 
so very much in all the forces of society about you ? 
Are you thinking on these questions at all, these ques- 
tions over which mankind was pondering before Europe 



THE IDEAL MANHOOD. I37 

hurled itself against the lance of Saladin, before the 
wild shouts of the barbarians drowned the voices of 
philosophers in the academic groves of Athens, which 
are the dominant questions in human progress now, and 
will survive with crescent interest when every other is 
settled, 

*' When the battle-flags are furled 
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World'' ? 

Are you reaching forward, as God gives you strength, 
towards this element of ideal manhood, — truth, — so that 
you can say, with one of the most devout and earnest 
thinkers of our race, " I know in whom I have put my 
trust'^ ? There was the power in the weak body of 
Paul which lifted him up above all the men of his 
time, the power of living truth, which draws all the 
modern world to study him rather than any other of 
Rome's one hundred millions of people, rather than 
their master and emperor whom he could not approach 
in the splendid luxury of Caprese. Let your mind feed 
on the great thoughts by which he lives, by the lack of 
which Tiberius is dead. Do not be driftwood on the 
currents of human thought. Be a thinker. Remem- 
ber that a sneer is not an argument, and that you can- 
not laugh truth's chivalry away. Never mind if all 
the world seems to be turning away and reviling that 
which you think is right. All the world may be wrong, 
and you may be Athanasius, or Copernicus, or Galileo, 
or Harvey, or Garrison. Be nothing for controversy's 
sake, but everything for truth's sake. But have a mind 
that is not asleep, that is at work in the light and grow- 

12^ 



138 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

ing into a riper age. They tell us that wheat is found 
in the Pyramids which has lain in the darkness there 
w^ithout sprouting for thousands of years, and that it 
begins to throb with life at the first kiss of the sunlight. 
Look into your mind and see if thoughts and concep- 
tions are not hidden there, just as they were left by 
your father or mother in a day long gone, which you 
are clasping tight, keeping them close to your very 
heart, which have no peace there, which cannot grow 
there, which can never be worth anything to you or 
the world until you turn your reason in upon them, 
start them into an active life, and make them your own 
by seeing that they are full of slumbering vitality. In 
the first lectures of this course I tried to put this sub- 
ject of the necessity of thought into such a shape as to 
stimulate thought, for it is by thinking only that we 
can ever have a rational mind. The old sacramentaries 
have not any truer expression of the longings of hu- 
manity than St. Chrysostom^s prayer : " Grant us in 
this world knowledge of Thy truth, and in the world 
to come life everlasting.^^ 

MORALITY. 

3. Side by side with sincerity and truth there is 
the equally binding obligation to live a pure and moral 
life, and be true and honest and manly in our relations 
toward our fellow-men. This is the flower and fruit 
of a living truth. Just in proportion as you have 
worked up into your life, and all that you can get of 
high and divine truth, will you find it easy to be true 
toward man and toward yourself. 



THE IDEAL MANHOOD. 139 

Take, for instance, the single truth that "Jesus 
Christ came to seek and to save that which was lost/^ 
Now, let a man so thoroughly master that thought as 
to make it an intense reality in his life ; let it be so true 
and actual to him as to keep ever before him the pic- 
ture of one going, as it were, from the joys and com- 
forts of a happy and contented home down into the 
fever districts, into the stricken tenements, into the 
miseries and contagion and filth and blasphemy which 
are the wash of the river ; of His giving up His life, 
not to disease, but to the malice of the sick whom He 
went to help ; of the splendid love which could not 
forget their sufferings, even amid His own, and do you 
suppose that a man who holds that truth close to his 
souFs heart can be mean and selfish and greedy and 
hard in his dealings with men? That great truth be- 
comes in him an expanding power which forces his na- 
ture into larger and larger views. The love of Christ 
constrains, compels in him the strongest efforts to do 
something for those far whom Christ died. If Christ 
so loved him, he must love his fellow-men. That truth 
becomes the spring and fountain of all his humanities. 
It will not let him be sour and morose any more than 
the sun will leave a section of black darkness on the 
summer lawn. It will not let him lie or steal or com- 
mit adultery or slander, for just as he approaches these 
he finds his holy picture melting into indistinctness and 
rushes back to it again. Like Siloam, all his reading 
and amusements and habits become purified and healing 
so soon as this angelic truth touches them. He begins 
to see the possibility of that ideal life which St. John 



140 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

described when he said that those who are born of God 
cannot sin. Now, take another man in whom such 
truths as this one finds no home, and see how much his 
powers for moral duty are dwarfed. If there be no 
God, if there be no Christ, if there be no future, if 
there be no rewards and punishments, all the philosophy 
in the world cannot persuade men in the mass to a life 
of unselfishness and charity and strict morality. 

In the fierce desire to extract everything possible 
from a rapidly-closing life, the strong must drive the 
weak to the wall. The morality of Hobbes and Shaftes- 
bury, which permits every vice but punishes detection, 
becomes dominant. There is no incentive to good, none 
to resist evil. Eat and drink, we die to-morrow; 
Dum vivimus, vivimus, — while we live, let us live. 
These are pagan mottoes, but they truly stand for the 
morality which is not born of eternal truths. You 
cannot divorce your duty towards God from your duty 
towards man, and as you discharge both those duties 
best, you grow towards the manhood of which the world 
stands in need. After the last three lectures of this 
course I do not think it necessary to say that you are in 
no sense of the word a Christian or a religious man 
unless you are in every sense of the word a moral man. 
Many persons may deceive themselves, but that is a 
truth which is unshakable. In the last day many shall 
say "Lord! Lord!^^ many shall urge their profession 
of the Saviour's faith, but against every form of vice, 
hidden behind a baptismal sign and formula, the answer 
is clear : " Depart from Me, all ye that work iniquity. 
I never knew you.'' I will not go again over what I 



TEE IDEAL MANHOOD. 141 

have said in former lectures as to the life you ought to 
lead and the evils which you ought to shun, but when 
you hear men sneer at the morality of the Christian 
religion, be sure you distinguish between the religion 
and its professors. No man can condemn any form of 
vice more severely than the Gospel does, and none can 
offer such helps to fight it as the same Gospel does. 
" They who are born of the Spirit of God, they are the 
sons of God.^^ And that spirit is the spirit of joy and 
peace, and long suffering and charity, and brotherly 
kindness and purity. By these graces the Gospel 
emancipated the slaves of ancient Rome; by these she 
dotted the world with hospitals and asylums ; by these 
she made mankind recognize the divine right of weak- 
ness and suffering ; by these she is even now projecting 
the life and hope of civilization into the darkest cor- 
ners of the earth. Last year she fed and cared for 
perishing thousands beneath the Himalayas, giving 
them, with human love, the bread of two worlds. To- 
day, behind that ancient wall which once shut China 
from the Word, she is laboring with sorrow and tears to 
imitate the Saviour's miracle of love in feeding the mul- 
titudes who are lying down to die. In the Dark Con- 
tinent she is sending her missionary by the side of the 
first explorer, striving, as she does everywhere, to make 
the world happier, — to 

*' Sing out the darkness of the land, 
Eing in the Christ that is to be.*' 

Young men, the religion that is doing this, that is 
encircling the world with a blossoming wreath of love 
and kindness, which esteems every soul of man alike, 



142 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

wlietlier it be under a dark skin or a white one, which 
is consecrated to one great purpose, the enlightenment 
and salvation of all the world, ought not to be put upon 
tlie defensive as to her humanity, and brought to the 
bar to plead before men who do not help her in her 
work. Against all such efforts to stab her in her royal 
progress the very murderers themselves should feel the 
remorse as they do the deed of the Scottish earl, and 
acknowledge that she 

*' Hath borne her faculties so meek, hath been 
So clear in her great office, that her virtues 
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against 
The deep damnation of her taking off. 
And Pity, like a naked new-born babe 
Striding the blast, or Heaven's cherubim, horsed 
Upon the sightless couriers of the air, 
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, 
That tears shall drown in the wind." 

FAITH. 

4. There is one other element of the ideal manhood 
to which I must refer, and that is Faith. By that I 
mean an abiding trust in all that is unseen and yet real, 
a strong grasp of the hidden hands that stretch out 
towards us from the celestial country. I mean by faith 
the mighty power which keeps us true to ideal vir- 
tues and fresh in our confidence that whatever may 
seem to be the course of things about us, yet there is a 
directing and loving Father who is managing it all. I 
remember that in Luther's "Table-Talk'^ he in one 
place speaks of a bird sitting on the branch of a tree, 
in the midst of a thunder-storm, and carolling in its 



THE IDEAL MANHOOD, 143 

sense of security, and the effect it had on him in making 
him stronger in his trust in God. That tells just what 
I want to. 

'Manhood protests against the reproduction of the 
worst forms of pagan materialism, resolving everything 
into so much lime and dust, and refusing to think of 
anything that cannot be w^eighed and analyzed. It re- 
volts from any theory that denies the radical differences 
of mind and matter. It will not have the great w^orld 
where the soul lives sunk and lost under the seas of 
scepticism. 

Though Lisbon perished in an earthquake, we cannot 
let Voltaire bury our God in its ruins ; though Caesar's 
wife shall fall, we cannot abandon our ideal of woman's 
virtue ; though Pitt shall be silenced by a pension, yet 
patriotism shall linger in the souls of men; though 
Abelard shall be a villain, yet ideal love shall be for- 
ever an inspiration in the world ; though no eye could 
see beyond the portals of the grave, yet the immortality 
of the soul should forever brighten the dull lives of 
men. Faith in all these things irradiates and beautifies 
our nature. It preserves and freshens the dew which 
lay like enamel on our souls in the early morning of 
our life. It preserves us from the sad thoughts which 
Colonel Realf has so beautifully expressed, and with 
which I am content to close these lectures : 

"my slain. 

*' This sweet child which has climbed upon my knee, 
This amber-haired, four-summered little maid, 
With her unconscious beauty, troubleth me, 
With her low prattle maketh me afraid. 



144 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

Ah, darling 1 when you cling and nestle so 
You hurt nic, though you do not see me cry, 
Nor hear the weariness with which I sigh 

For the dear babe I killed so long ago. 
I tremble at the touch of your caress ; 

I am not worthy of your innocent faith ; 
I who with whetted knives of worldliness 

Did put my own child-heartedness to death, 
Beside whose grave I pace forever more, 
Like desolation on a shipwrecked shore. 

*^ There is no little child within me now, 

To sing back to the thrushes, to leap up 
When June winds kiss me, when an apple-bough 

Laughs into blossoms, or a buttercup 
Plays with the sunshine, or a violet 

Dances in the glad dew. Alas ! Alas ! 

The meaning of the daisies in the grass 
I have forgotten ; and if my cheeks are wet, 

It is not with the blitheness of the child, 
But with the bitter sorrow of sad years. 

O moaning life, with life irreconciled ; 
O backward-looking thought, pain, O tears I 

For us there is not any silver sound 

Of rhythmic wonders springing from the ground. 

" Woe worth the knowledge and the bookish lore 

Which makes men mummies, weighs out every grain 

Of that which was miraculous before. 

And sneers the heart down with the scoffing brain ; 

Woe worth the peering, analytic days 
That dry the tender juices in the breast 
And put the thunders of the Lord to test. 

So that no marvel must be, and no praise. 
Nor any God except Necessity. 

What can ye give my poor, starved life in lieu 
Of this dead cherub which I slew for ye ? 

Take back your doubtful wisdom, and renew 
My early foolish freshness of the dunce, 
Whose simple instincts guessed the heavens at once." 



mCERSOLLISM : ITS PURPOSE AND SPIRIT. 

Last week this city was adorned by a Congress of 
the Liberal League. To almost everybody it is well 
known that this League is composed of a large number 
of that kind of people who are dissatisfied with every- 
thing and everybody as found in nature. Born with 
the word '' reform'^ already gurgling in their throats, 
they spend their lives in underrating every good thing 
and exaggerating every evil thing. Most of them are 
apparently of a dreamy and visionary nature, and if 
society should be subjected to only a fraction of their 
recommended nostrums, she would be rocked to her 
foundations. The name ^^Liberay^ it must be ac- 
knowledged, seems a just one. From the principal 
reports of their discussions it appears as if there were 
no limit to the range of its reforming spirit. The 
heavens above, the earth beneath, and especially the 
things underneath the earth, are resolved to be in a 
most unfortunate and unsatisfactory condition, and the 
whole realm of nature seems a tribute far too small to 
appease the insatiable appetite for reform on the part 
of the Liberal League. The liberality which divests 
one's self of all he has to assist others is as commend- 
able as it is rare. But when this Convention becomes 
so liberal that it offers through its Socialist wing to give 
away everybody else's property in this world, and 
G ^ 13 "^ 145 



146 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

throiigli its IngersoU wing to throw in with it every- 
body else's expectancy in the world to come, and 
doesn't offer us any greater receipt than a complimen- 
tary notice that we are sharks and dupes, it becomes 
somewhat questionable whether it is not greater liberty 
than most illiberal people care to have taken with 
them. Reform is good, but such a thorough reforming 
of it altogether as is suggested by this body seems at 
first a little violent. For it is merely hypothetical that 
we shall be better and richer and wiser when God has 
been reformed away, and we are at that sublime alti- 
tude which Elizur Wright pictured, where the spiritual 
in man worships the physical, and where the sexes 
adore each other forever, or w^here tramps are protected 
and supported by the State, where the rights of prop- 
erty are shifting, and redistribution of earned w^ealth 
puts a premium on shiftlessness and laziness and dis- 
soluteness. It looks somewhat as though the League, 
in its multitude of councils as to a definite point of 
attack, had selected too many points, — in fact, had left 
no point observable to the eye unassailed. With every 
member looking in a different direction, and each 
clamoring that he sees the greatest blunder or the worst 
tyranny, they may be good sentinels, but they can^t be 
fiercely aggressive, or carry the heavy battalions which 
Bonaparte thought registered the divine will. But as 
they have at least one brilliant man leading them, and 
are making some noise in their day, I ask you to con- 
sider w^hat they propose and what principles they pro- 
fess. So long as Mr. IngersoU occupied a merely nega- 
tive position, criticising, pulling down old institutions, 



INGERSOLLISM: ITS PURPOSE AND SPIRIT. 147 

he had a position which no man on the earth was so 
competent to fill as liimself. A briUiant mind, a fas- 
cinating speaker, with rare magnetism of oratory, a 
poet by nature, with humor sparkling and fresh, clear, 
incisive diction, earnest and fervid, and of course honest 
and sincere, he moved about the entire range of positive 
Christian doctrine and life, and winged his arrowa 
towards every joint and flaw. One sarcastic and pointed 
anecdote, unanswerable because an anecdote, pierced the 
inspiration of the Scriptures. One scathing, eloquent 
denunciation of Calvin or the Inquisition was enough 
with ignorant and unreflecting minds to pierce the 
warm and loving heart of Christianity, whose every 
throb forces life-blood into a thousand hospitals and 
marks the health of the noblest charities which bless 
the earth. Like the Bedouin of the desert, his rapid 
attack fell on stragglers and weak spots in the long 
caravan, and no sooner was preparation made to meet 
him than he was off* to some other point, and the sallies 
were brilliant and successful, because there was no tell- 
ing where to find him or how long he would consent 
to stand on one proposition. You can't train a siege- 
gun on a buzzing wasp, and you can't produce all the 
evidences of Christianity in an instant. With his great 
power it was easy to stand before an audience, and with- 
out one intelligent conviction himself, without a single 
affirmative statement, melt them into sympathy by 
frequent and splendid references to dimpled babies and 
loving fatherhood, and human love and freedom, and 
priestcraft and modern science. But all these qualities, 
which make him so powerful as a disorganizer, unfit 



148 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

liim for constructing and defending a better system 
than Christianity. 

" The aspiring youth who fired the Ephesian dome 
Outlives in fame the pious fool that reared it." 

To destroy requires certain powers ; to create, very 
different ones. And everything that Mr. Ingersoll has 
said against Christianity may be returned honestly and 
crushingly against any system of religion or no relig- 
ion, morals or no morals, which he sets forth. In this 
Convention, as usual, he said more of what he did not 
believe than of what he did, but the platform and reso- 
lutions do affirm some things, as we shall see. 

PURPOSE OF THE NATIONAL LIBERAL LEAGUE. 

What is the purpose, the raison d^etre, of the National 
Liberal League ? It is expressed in its preliminary 
declaration and platform : 

'^Resolved, That the general purpose and motive of 
the National Liberal party is to realize more fully than 
ever yet has been done the main object of a govern- 
ment by the people, as expressed in the Declaration of 
Independence and the preamble to the Constitution of 
the United States, to wit, that it shall be made true, 
as far as possible, in our country that all persons shall 
hereafter be born free and equal, and be endowed with 
certain rights, among which shall be liberty and the 
right to the pursuit of happiness.'^ 

In passing, I may say it seems very strange that 
people who most swear by the Declaration of Independ- 
ence never read it, or else immediately forget it, and 



INGERSOLLISM: ITS PURPOSE AND SPIRIT. I49 

make it say, as this resolution does^ things notoriously 
untrue. The pen of JeflFerson never wrote that men are 
born free and equal. That is the emanation of modern 
party-makers. After the general definition of a pur- 
pose, there are nine specified forms of evil which the 
licague feels called on to crush, ending with the great 
evil of a religious conception among the people, and a 
reaffirmation of the principles of the Liberal League, 
which are exclusively devoted to the hardships and 
tyranny imposed in this free country upon infidels and 
atheists. As to the first part of the platform, dictated 
entirely by the Socialists, I do not care to speak, further 
than to say that if the Liberals are not clearer in ideas 
as to the future world than they are as to this one, 
they won't receive much encouragement from thinking 
people. 

' The schemes as to landed property, as to corporations, 
as to tramps, as to banking and currency, are so wild 
and destructive that I am sure Mr. Ingersoll and his 
wing of the League must have shivered while they 
voted for them. When I think of some of the sensible 
political speeches which Mr. Ingersoll has made, and 
remember that he had a clear head on these matters, 
I am compelled to think he voted for these resolu- 
tions while despising them, and that he is not much 
better than many men whom he has denounced for sub- 
scribing to articles in church creeds rather than disturb 
harmony and invite disruption. In his liberal way he 
is on the road to those attacks of throat trouble which 
come from suppressing small fragments of truth and 

saying those things which he does not entirely believe. 

13* 



150 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

He calls it ^^ parsonitis/' He must soon find that men 
bound together in a great cause like that of the Chris- 
tian faith may legitimately profess the same body of 
principles, and may fight manfully under that creed, 
while individuals may diflFer as to the importance, or 
even truth, of some minor principles in it. Men can 
organize for a purpose only by agreeing to allow diverse 
opinions on details, and the charge of hypocrisy made 
by Ingersoll against Christians who do not see every 
point of faith exactly alike is unjust, as I should be 
unjust in calling him a hypocrite for subscribing to a 
Socialist platform which he does not believe. 

But is the purpose of the Liberal League a sufficient 
one to give it life and success so far as it seeks mental 
enfranchisement ? Is it true that any man is bound in 
fetters now for his opinion's sake ? Is liberty of thought 
denied to any person under the American flag? Is 
liberty of utterance yet unknown, that societies must 
organize and fight for it and secure it ? 

One would think so, to hear these men talk. Mr. 
Ingersoll says, " Standing in the presence of the Un- 
known, all have the same right to think, and all are 
equally interested in the great question of origin and 
destiny. All I claim, all I plead for, is liberty of 
thought and expression ; that is all. Take those chains 
from the human heart. Break those fetters. The good 
men and good women are tired of the whip and lash 
in the realm of thought.'' Well, if that is all he 
pleads for, it seems very much as if there were not 
much more for him to do, nor for the Liberal League. 
Mr. Ingersoll has been freely expressing his thoughts 



INOERSOLLISM: ITS PURPOSE AND SPIRIT. 151 

for years in public halls, in theatres, in pamphlets, in- 
terviews, lectures, books, conversation, and correspond- 
ence. Has he ever known any tyrannical opposition ? 
Has the iron of the martyr^s chain ever clanked against 
his heart ? Where are the fetters against which he so 
eloquently pleads ? The sound of whip and lash has 
died away upon the shores of the past, and not even 
its dying echoes reach his ear. Is he not the Don 
Quixote of the nineteenth century, fighting valiantly 
against a spirit that everybody else knows to be dead 
long years ago ? What is there on all the circumference 
of his life that touches his mental freedom as a restraint? 
The book-stores are crowded with his publications. 
The press takes up every word that falls from him, 
and yet he pleads for liberty of thought and expression 
and melts audiences to tears by pathetic appeals for the 
removal of the whip and the chain, and rings all the 
changes on that marvellous word of liberty. When the 
time comes that a single feather presses down the lips 
of any man, and freedom of thought and speech is 
touched even on the hem of its sacred garment, Mr. 
Ingersoll shall not stand alone in denouncing the great 
wrong. The liberty I claim I grant ; but I am not so 
narrow-minded as to think that my liberty is interfered 
with when men refuse to see things as I do, or when 
they criticise and denounce me. Do I not say that 
which you all know to be true in letter and spirit w^hen 
I say that the air and the elements of God are not more 
free in their progress in the w^orld than the thoughts of 
any man who has thoughts ? No matter what you think 
about religious matters, you may freely express those 



152 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

thoughts in any place, at any time, if you can get men 
to listen. You may publish them if you want to. You 
may send them through the public mail. You may do 
any tiling, everything, that may be done with the Word 
of God itself. " Break those fetters. The good men 
and good women are tired of the whip and lash." That 
is an unworthy plea. It is a dead issue, and the party 
that builds itself on it will be the dead to bury the 
dead. The good women and the good men cannot be 
roused by that slogan now. The drift is the other way. 
There is no doubt that if the Liberal League had been 
in existence at the time, it would have appealed to 
popular sympathy by crying " Fire !^' in the flood of 
Noah's days. It is not more preposterous now to clamor 
for free speech and free thought in an age of license and 
a flood of opinions. If there were any more restraints 
upon the utterance of the Liberal Convention than there 
would be upon that of a Methodist Conference or a 
Presbyterian Synod, it did not appear to the naked 

eye- 
But they claim that there is a restriction on the free- 
dom of thought, and at Mr. Ingersoll's motion they 
passed resolutions of sympathy with a man named D. 
M. Bennett, who is in the penitentiary, after two con- 
victions before the United States courts, for publishing 
and circulating obscene and immoral books. He is 
their martyr, their suffering champion, their confes- 
sor for liberty of speech. It seems a commentary on 
the different purposes of Christianity and Liberalism, 
that the church habitually stands in defence of the de- 
cent and pure against immorality, while this Conven- 



INGERSOLLISM: ITS PURPOSE AND SPIRIT. I53 

tion of Liberals feels called on to canonize a man who 
has been twice convicted by the national courts of gross 
and criminal attempts to deflower the young minds of 
his country. To say that there was any question of 
religion, any bigotry of dogmatic theology in this pros- 
ecution, is to contradict every fact and oath in the case. 
The reason that Christian sentiment has been elicited 
in favor of the Society for the Suppression of Vice in 
this case is simply because it was an effort to suppress 
vice in its worst and most pernicious form. What are 
the facts? In the year 1866 a few gentlemen in the 
city of New York, appalled by the facts brought to 
their knowledge as to the amount of licentious books 
and articles daily sent through the United States mails, 
formed, an association among themselves to check it. 
By properly representing the enormity of the evil they 
secured action by the State Legislature in 1868, and 
stringent laws were passed prohibiting the sale or ad- 
vertisement of immoral, obscene, and indecent writings 
or articles. Then the association was incorporated and 
given police authority by the New York Legislature in 
May, 1873. About the same time Congress passed a 
law forbidding, under penalty of imprisonment and 
fine, the circulation through the United States mails 
of all indecent matter, printed or other, in all the States 
and Territories. Under the laws, and especially under 
the national law, the Society for the Suppression of 
Vice has been working for six years. What they have 
done, what a Pompeii of rottenness and nastiness they 
have uncovered and exposed, what .sewers of filthy 
thought they have shown running beneath our social 



154 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

life and emitting poisonous gases into our homes, can 
be known only to those who read the reports. 

They have arrested one hundred and ten persons in 
the United States courts, and have convicted altogether 
one hundred and five, twelve others having absconded. 
They have seized and destroyed sixteen thousand seven 
hundred pounds of books, fourteen thousand pounds 
of stereotype plates, two hundred and tliirteen thou- 
sand circulars, catalogues, poems, etc. They have se- 
cured the names of six thousand dealers in this kind 
of poison. They have followed the devious windings 
of this hideous, unnatural, devilish business, and dis- 
covered that it is to the young and pure-minded these 
deviFs tools are secretly sent and sold. In the hands 
of these dealers this society has found the addresses of 
hundreds of thousands of girls and boys, taken from 
school and seminary catalogues, and to these children 
they have been yearly sending these soul-killing publi- 
cations under the sacred seal of the United States mails. 
Following up these addresses, the agent of the society 
has made inquiries as to the results of these secret and 
noxious influences. 

To hear him tell the story of young, innocent girls 
who have been discovered w^ith these things in their 
possession, and who have gone down from the coronal 
summits of a maiden's pure-heartedness to the low 
depths where no pure thing lives, in the endless gloom 
and unlifting miasm of a harlot's life, is enough to fire 
the heart against men who can coin heart-blood into 
money, and put a girl's }ionor and innocence under the 
minting die. To know there are six thousand men in 



INOERSOLLISM: ITS PURPOSE AND SPIRIT. I55 

the United States whose sole business is to undermine 
the morals of the land is enough to call all decent 
people to the assistance of any agency that undertakes 
to suppress the evil. These books and articles are not 
scientific works; they are not written and made for any 
defensible purpose except to make money. They have 
nothing to do with any religious questions, and are 
simply the exhalations of the lowest intelligence of the 
lowest creatures who bear the generic name of man. 
In the progress of their legitimate work, this society 
arrested D. M. Bennett, of New York, and he w^as in- 
dicted and tried before the United States courts, under 
the national laws, for circulating indecent publications 
through the mails. He was convicted by the clearest 
evidence, and imprisoned. By a mistaken clemency, 
as I think, this man was pardoned by President Hayes, 
immediately began to publish the same book, was again 
arrested, again convicted, again imprisoned, again ap- 
plied for pardon. Executive clemency w^as refused, 
and he is to-day serving out his term for violating the 
laws of his country. There is no more question about 
the man's religion or irreligion in the case than there 
is as to his vaccination. It was not thought of. A 
United States court could not, under the constitution, 
listen for a moment to any such considerations. The 
law of Congress under w^hich he was twice convicted is 
explicit, and was enough, and had no more of a squint 
toward religious bigotry than it had toward the remon- 
etization of silver. Does any one imagine for a mo- 
ment that a Congress of the United States, which, as w^e 
all know, is not generally chosen with reference to the 



156 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

candidates' qualifications for a competitive examination 
in the Scriptures, gave power into the hands of any body 
of men to act as inquisitors upon the general religioas 
beliefs of the community? Every one knows that there 
M^ouldn't be a quorum left in either House so soon as 
the law got well into operation. Does any one believe 
that the United States courts are sending men to the 
penitentiary because they don't believe the five points 
of Calvinism, and without any law of the United 
States Legislature to warrant them in doing so ? And 
yet, amid a storm of applause. Colonel Ingersoll offered 
the following resolution in this late convention, in be- 
half of a man who was eulogized on the floor as '' our 
champion of free thought," a man "more intelligent 
and more moral than Jesus Christ :" 

" Resolved, That we express the deepest sympathy 
with D. M. Bennett and his family for the reason that 
he has been convicted by religious bigotry and ignorant 
zeal, and has been imprisoned and is now languishing 
in the cell of a felon, when in truth and fact he com- 
mitted no offence whatever against any law of the land." 

If that can be made good, it w^ould seem as if the 
thing for Mr. Ingersoll to do is not to pass resolutions, 
but to apply for a habeas corpus and restore the poor 
sufferer to his family and occupation. 

If Bennett has not committed any offence whatever 
against any law of the land, and is yet a convict, this 
League has a mission, and it can best fulfil it by 
entering articles of impeachment against the stern and 
tyrannical Calvinist who presided over the court that 
illegally sentenced him. Here is a tangible issue. 



INGERSOLLJSM : ITS PURPOSE AND SPIRIT. 157 

Here is a splendid opportunity for Mr. Ingersoll to do 
something real for the cause of the liberty and freedom 
of religious conviction, to which he has consecrated his 
life. He is a lawyer and knows the mode of procedure. 
He makes a distinct assertion in this resolution, and on 
that point, to use his own language, '' I beg one fact, 
one little fact." No more swelling periods or abstract 
hardships. ^' I pass the hat around for one single fact" 
as to the religious bigotry which twice convicted D. M. 
Bennett, when in fact and truth he had violated no law 
of the land. 

It is vain for him to answer that the publications of 
Bennett were not indecent or that they were scientific 
works. On that point the court is the legal tribunal 
to determine ; and if I could read extracts from the book 
here, I think I could poll this audience with perfect 
safety as to their agreement that it is utterly and en- 
tirely unfit to be read, because the motive, the animus, 
of the book is to eat away the enamel from unsuspecting 
innocence. 

However, I must say no more on this subject of the 
purpose of this new party. If it has no other mission 
than to take the shackles from the soul of man, it is 
born some centuries too late. It has no place nor 
enemy here. Those with whom it would wrestle are 
vanished from the earth. The colonel fiercely attacks 
what he thinks to be the shining helmet of the Mam- 
brino of intolerance, but he will find it only a barber's 
basin ; the castle, garrisoned, as he thinks, with ecclesi- 
astical hates and tyrannies, will break his polished lance- 
head off by the swinging of its wind-urged arms, and 

14 



158 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

the ideal queen of his soul, " Mental Liberty/^ will be 
found everywhere that he turns in the streets of this 
great Toboso. But if he binds himself indeed to the 
spirit of which Bennett is the champion, then I pray 
God he may be many centuries too early. The good 
men and the good women are not tired of the chains 
which drag back the bloody jaws and dripping fangs 
of licentiousness and lust. On these chains the spirit 
of the human race is ever forging new rivets, and, as 
its ponderous hammer falls, it will not pause to pity 
those who, seeking to undo its work, are crushed beneath 
its energy, even if some men shall crown them martyrs 
tq a holy cause. Colonel IngersoU has said many noble 
things about the grandeur of virtue. What are they 
all worth if he sympathizes so deeply with the men 
who live by hunting virtue down ? His pictures of a 
happy home are painted with a master's hand from the 
colors of the evening sky. What a home he will leave 
us if he successfully defends the men who fill our houses 
with the subtle gases that eat our children's hearts and 
brains ! The beauty, the divinity, of simple innocence 
is the theme on which he loves to speak, and on which 
he has sung his sweetest songs. There his pathetic elo- 
quence rises like the lark and carries us with it to clearer 
and undusty heights. Why is this worshipper of full- 
lipped innocence found as a celebrant in the temple 
where innocence is sacrificed on the altars of avarice 
and lust ? 

Is it not that the central spring in this strange man's 
life is a hatred to the cross of Jesus Christ, and where 
he sees the glittering of that cross his antagonism is 



INGERSOLLI^M : ITS PURPOSE AND SPIRIT. I59 

aroused and he joins the attack without a thought as to 
the standard under which he is compelled to fight? 
Hating lust and licentiousness with a mortal hatred, but 
hating Christianity with an intensity greater yet, he 
chooses the lesser evil for his support and hews per- 
sistently at the fair palace of the Gospel, even while 
knowing that on its site would rise the pest-house of a 
universal brothel. He would destroy the Gospel, even 
if the result which Pope sung, in apprehension of the 
triumph of Ignorance, be sure to follow the triumph 
of Liberalism : 

^^ She comes, she comes ! the sahle throne behold 
Of Night primeval and of Chaos old, 
As one by one, at dread Medea's strain, 
The sickening stars fade off the ethereal plain, 
As Argus' eyes, by Hermes' wand opprest, 
Close, one by one, to everlasting rest. 
Thus at her felt approach and secret might, 
Art after art goes out and all is night. 
See skulking Truth to her own cavern fled. 
Mountains of casuistry heaped o'er her head. 
Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before, 
Shrinks to her second cause and is no more. 
Eeligion, blushing, veils her sacred fires, 
And, unawares. Morality expires. 
Lo ! thy dread empire. Chaos, is restored, 
Light dies before thy uncreating sword. 
Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall, 
And universal darkness buries all." 

THE SPIRIT OF LIBERALISM. 

Having finished the discussion of the purpose of this 
body^ I ask you now to think of the spirit which actu- 
ates it. Is it a spirit which commends and ennobles it ? 



160 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

Again I take their first man^ Colonel Ingersoll, and 
try to find what his own spirit is, and I find, just as I 
liave been saying, that intolerance and hate dominate 
every and all other emotion. That would be a very 
severe thing to say were it not that he has made his 
reputation by denouncing the Christian Church and 
ministry for this very thing, and has arrogated to him- 
self a complete immunity from it. 

When I say intolerance and hate dominate all other 
emotions, you perceive I mean there are other emotions 
and feelings. But over all the clustering virtues, the 
beautiful flowers, of a warm, sympathetic heart, the 
violets and the roses with which his life abounds, there 
rises the great, dense, umbrageous passion, hate, morbid, 
unreasoning, unrelenting, intolerant hate, against the 
God and the religion and the believers of the Holy 
Bible. 

The undying spirit which put the rack to work in 
Torquemada's day, and severed the channels through 
which Marie Antoinette's cheeks gathered their dying 
blush, is the one which, had it its old-time potency, 
would be invoked to-day by Colonel Ingersoll to stamp 
out forever the principles of the Christian creed. Re- 
ligion is not the mother of intolerance, though it may 
exist in her children. If the history of Christianity 
shows the dark sides of humanity, it is because it is the 
religion of humanity, and its followers and supporters 
were mortal men. If it is marked by wars and blood- 
shed, it is because it alone of earthly passions appealed 
to every heart, and for the dearest thing they had men 
rushed fiercely into battle, and did not understand the 



INGERSOLLISM: ITS PURPOSE AND SPIRIT, 161 

spirit of the religion which they loved. To call the 
Gospel intolerant because in the days of Barbarossa and 
Philip II. it could not tame fierce barons and fiery 
Alvas into St. Johns and Eapliaels, is to forget the 
constant weakness and passions of our lawless nature. 
It was as men they were hard and intolerant and hate- 
ful. 

Religion was the weapon which they seized and 
abused. We do not hold up the spirit of commerce to 
anathema for her Punic wars, because it was passionate 
men, not merchants, who fought. The great throbbing 
spirit of free republican government is not to bear the 
stigma of brutishness and intolerance and savagery be- 
cause its erratic disciples have more than once made 
the world shudder at their ex:cesses and lawlessness. 
Liberty shall not bear the sins of all the righteous 
blood shed in her name by men never baptized in her 
spirit. The simple truth is that the world has never 
known a moral principle potent enough to control men's 
passions and eradicate the brute in our nature; but 
while, like all others, the Gospel has failed in accom- 
plishing this entirely, it has done more than all other 
agencies combined, and even in the darkest periods of 
human history, when men were least like men, it was 
the Church that interposed between the weak and the 
strong and compelled great monarchs to justice and 
fidelity. It was the Church that struck the shackles 
from sixty millions of human beings and made them citi- 
zens of Rome. It was the Church that broke forever 
the spirit of caste and made emperor and slave to stand 
in equality before God. It was the Church that reached 
I 14* 



162 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

down into the slums where men had lived and died like 
cattle, and reimplanted in their sodden natures the spark 
of primal ambition, by showing them that even a swine- 
herd might rise by merit to the dizzy altitude of a 
throne, and that a new age was dawning where ances- 
tral blood and accident of birth and wealth should not 
exclude pure hearts and simple faith and rugged intel- 
lects from their crown and sceptre. It was the Church 
that ennobled and enfranchised woman and assigned 
her rights which she compelled men to respect. Lecky 
and Mill and Gibbon are not the friends of the Church ; 
they do not see her in the beauty in which she seems to 
me to walk. But they are just, and even their praises 
glow and their applause is honest when they touch these 
points. And yet Colonel Ingersoll cannot say one word 
for her. If the spirit of hate can be lashed into angrier 
waves, if it can be vexed into stormier and more 
treacherous billows, than in this one sentence from his 
lectures, I have never known it so : " For more than 
fifty generations the Church has carried the black flag. 
Her vengeance has been measured only by her power. 
With the heart of a fiend she has hated, with the clutch 
of avarice she has grasped, with the jaws of a dragon 
she has devoured. Pitiless as famine, merciless as fire, 
with the conscience of a serpent, — such is the history of 
the Church of God.^' So says the apostle of liberal 
tolerance, so says the man who sneers at the narrow 
bigotry of the clergy, who cannot see any good in those 
who differ from them. 

Again he says in that broad, charitable spirit which 
he hopes will drive out the harsh, ecclesiastical hate : 



INGERSOLLISM: ITS PURPOSE AND SPIRIT. 163 

" The chief business of the clergy has always been to 
destroy the joy of life/^ " They have polluted the heart 
and paralyzed the brain/^ Is this the world^s judg- 
ment of F^nelon, of Herbert, of Jeremy Taylor, of 
Barrow, and South, and Leighton ? Is it the world^s 
judgment now of the great body of ministers laboring 
throughout the world ? Is it Colonel IngersolPs honest 
judgment of the man whom his child^s lips called 
father ? For he was born from one of these polluters 
of the heart and paralyzers of the brain. If this be not 
seeing an opponent's virtues with the eye of the mole 
and his faults with that of the lynx, then intolerance 
has not yet been wrapped in the swaddling-clothes of this 
life. Time and again, habitually, this avatar of freer and 
nobler charity gathers all the four hundred millions of 
Christians, to say nothing of other religionists, whom he 
also despises, under one term and designation, — hypo- 
crites. No exception, no qualification ; they are all alike. 
And then, in a burst of complaining martyrdom, hear 
him say, " The clergy can conceive of no goodness, of no 
spiritual exaltation, beyond the horizon of their creed. 
To re-enact the tragedies of the sixteenth century they 
lack only the power. Bigotry in all ages has been the 
same.'' I am a clergyman, and therefore, by Colonel 
Ingersoll's verdict, disqualified from seeing anything 
good or noble in those who differ from my creed, but I 
may say to you in confidence that if the time shall ever 
come when my heart shall be so arid, and my charity 
so small, that I shall use those scathing words of any 
man, much more of any great profession of men, which 
he habitually uses of the clergymen, I beg you to find 



164 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

mc a niche in some old musenm where I may be forever, 
with rack and collar and thumb-screw, among the relics 
of man's inhumanity to man. And with all my deep 
aversion from that cause and those principles, or lack 
of them, which this Liberal Convention espouses, be- 
lieving, as I sincerely do, that their success would rele- 
gate the race to the horrors of barbarism, yet it is not 
in my heart to say that I believe all these men to be 
scoundrels and hypocrites because they differ from me. 
The spirit of bigotry is the same in all ages, or Colonel 
Ingersoll never could have so falsified and burlesqued 
the sweet spirit of the forgiving Gospel as to say of it 
as he does : 

" Redden your hands with human blood, blast by 
slander the fair fame of the innocent, strangle the 
smiling child upon its mother's knee, deceive, ruin, and 
desert the beautiful girl who loves and trusts you, and 
your case is not hopeless. But deny the existence of 
these divine ghosts, of these gods, and the sweet 
and tearful face of mercy becomes livid with eternal 
hate.'' 

The man who penned that sentence knows what it 
means to be livid with eternal hate. No ; the spirit of 
this liberalism, like its purpose, does not commend it to 
the healthy morning air of the nineteenth century. It 
cannot linger while the pale glimpses of the moon are 
merging their silver with the richer colors of the pur- 
pling east. 

The progress of the Church to-day is one made by 
appeals to the reason and the will of men. Those who 
come to her are drawn simply by the cords of love. 



INGERSOLLISM: ITS PURPOSE AND SPIRIT. 165 

She asks no favors, she asks simply justice. When 
men say she does no good, she forgets, but they should 
not, that from her outstretched hand the noblest charities 
of the earth have been scattered. Where the angry life 
battle has raged most fiercely, there her busy fingers 
have built hospitals and provided ambulances ; where 
poverty has raised his hands to slay, there she has put 
her almshouses and bethels ; where the lame, and blind, 
and dumb, and broken-minded — the storm-blown blos- 
soms from the tree of life — have fallen to the earth to 
die, her tender heart has found them asylums and joys. 
She is working with a nobility of purpose and an ele- 
vation of spirit that demand encouragement. She has 
no weapons but the sword of the Spirit ; she has no 
intolerance except for harsh and cynical injustice. 
There is no compulsion by which she can enlist any 
man, there is no power by which she can exclude any, 
and from end to end of her earth-girdling encampments, 
by all her bivouac fires, which illuminate the skies of 
every zone, you will not find so much of the spirit of 
intolerant hate as burns luridly in the utterances of the 
Liberal League and literature. 



GIRLHOOD. 

In beginning this course of lectures to women I do 
not know any better subject than the girlhood where 
womanhood itself begins. To those who are in the 
most dependent and yet freest condition in which 
woman ever finds herself — the girlhood which has all 
the joys and none of the cares of life — I am to speak 
to-night. There is a natural hesitation in attempting 
to address and make suggestions to those whose ex- 
periences and life are so different from my own. But 
as one need not be a sculptor to criticise Greenough or 
Ward, or a cook to criticise the dish that is served him 
from the kitchen, so one need not be a woman to speak 
to women. While he can never know experimentally 
the feelings and passions of female nature, can never 
know how many and what kind of hindrances and 
perplexities she encounters in her efforts to form a true 
character, yet he may see more clearly than a woman 
herself what her true character ought to be and how 
she may best strive for it. A man pulling to the shore, 
through a heavy surf Ivuows, and he only knows, the 
effort he is making and the amount he can endure, but 
any child on the shore knows better than he how 
much progress he makes and the direction in which he 
swings. 

If it be true, as has been so frequently said, that no 
1G6 



GIRLHOOD. 167 

woman is capable of judging another, it may be that, 
after all, it is to the opposite sex they must look for 
unbiassed opinions. However that is, it is with a sin- 
cere and earnest desire to say something that can help 
and instruct you that I am animated, and over every- 
thing that may be said, encouragingly or otherwise, there 
is the deepest and most enduring reverence for the 
female nature which envelops my life with the many 
relations of mother, sister, wife, and daughter. Girl- 
hood is the bud of womanhood. It is the time when 
the nature clings, closely wrapped and enleaved, around 
the promise and the life. 

The very first thought that is suggested arises from 
such a figure, and that is that the girl should be 
modest and retiring. 

MODESTY. 

The same influences which have changed the char- 
acter of our boys in this age and given rise to the term 
" Young America'^ have wrought a similar change in 
the character of our girls. There is a self-assertion, a 
pushing forward, common among them which would 
have shocked their grandmothers. Instead of receptive 
natures, absorbing, learning, quietly and modestly, there 
is a common type of young girls who cannot find time 
enough to tell all they know. They have lost that 
strange something, that enveloping air of shrinking 
and retiring sensitiveness, which we naturally expect 
in girls. The bloom, the freshness, of young years is 
missing. You have often seen a peach as it hangs 
upon the tree, flushed with the color of the sun which 



168 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

it lias drunk in. All over it there is a strange bioom, 
utterly indescribable, but still real and marvellously- 
beautiful, — so real that the slightest touch of the hand 
removes it forever. The young, ripening girlhood 
wears just such a bloom, and withers and fades when 
it is pushed into an unnatural contact with the world. 
These are the years when you are to receive, not give, 
influences. God, who made everything wisely and for 
some good end, has so arranged our lives that the re- 
sponsibilities imposed upon us are preceded by long 
preparation to bear them. Your period of life is that 
of getting, not of imparting. Pupilage is just as noble 
and as necessary as teaching, and the same responsibility 
which is upon older women to do something active in 
imparting their influence is upon you to be passive in 
receiving influences which shall form your character. 
The clouds which pour down their beneficent showers 
upon the thirsty earth must be slowly formed by sight- 
less vapors and by ten thousand unseen mists. And 
the womanhood that blesses the world by an active 
beneficence must be content to follow the girlhood of 
slowly-forming and invisible influences which shrink 
from inspection and analysis. You are not expected 
to have views on questions which agitate the world. 
You are not expected by anybody to enlighten the 
world upon the Eastern question, or the policy of Bis- 
marck, or the tendency of scientific research, or the 
hardships of women. Nobody in his senses expects 
you to have your opinions formed and ready for ex- 
pression on such points, and the phenomenal girls who 
have definite and positive convictions on every possible 



GIRLHOOD, 169 

subject must expect to be regarded as monstrosities. 
To ask questions upon them^ to seek information, to 
listen eagerly, to have all the pores of your mind open 
and imbibing knowledge upon them, is pardonable and 
your duty. But it is enough to scare a person to hear 
a girl of sixteen solve the whole question of science and 
religion in ten words, eight of them dynamic adjectives. 
You have the same astonishment that you experience 
when the rain-drops patter upon you from a cloudless 
sky, that there is something coming from nothing. 
The girl has passed out of her sphere, has subjected 
herself to criticism and remark, and, therefore, has 
passed beyond the bounds of modesty. There is a 
sweet and powerful influence w^hich you possess, and 
which you only possess, but it is an influence only 
when you are unconscious of it. It is the same in- 
fluence which is exerted by the quiet retirement of the 
cloister or the Church. For these have all their 
mighty power in being untouched by the passions and 
arrogance and selfishness of the world. In their sweet 
and quiet sanctity, voiceless and yet hopeful, they are 
the modest teachers of modesty and innocence. And 
the sealed lips and flushed cheeks of innocent girlhood 
are the mightiest sermons which mankind hears urging 
it to seek again the innocence and humility which she 
emblems forth. 

The contempt which is felt for an effeminate man is 
not so great as that which is felt for a masculine girl. 
There is no greater absurdity than what is technically 
called a strong-minded girl, hoydenish, vain, despising 
her sex, and adopting the tones and language and 
H 15 



170 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

customs of men. She may draw crowds to her side 
and may seem to be popular, but it is the popularity 
of the Siamese twins, whom everybody wants to see, 
but whom everybody pities. All the play of a young, 
buoyant nature is just as modest as the nodding of the 
violets and the daisies, but the loud voice, the Ama- 
zonian gesture, the arrogant self-assertion and care- 
lessness of public opinion, are not parts of a delicately- 
balanced girlhood. They attract attention, but repel 
admiration. The most beautiful girl in the world will 
only be despised if ghe is always shrieking in the 
street-cars, or using masculine language, or telling 
questionable stories, or inviting delicate pieces of scan- 
dal, or challenging admiration by smoking cigarettes. 
It is expected that girls should have attentions from 
gentlemen, and you will have, unless this generation 
should reverse the precedents of all past ones. The 
only beau worth having is one who seeks you because 
he has a respect for you underlying every other feel- 
ing. And he will respect you only as he sees that you 
have a true womanly modesty which hedges you with 
its royal circle. Men may amuse themselves with a 
bright and clever girl who forgets this, but when they 
come to marry they want to marry a woman. It was 
one of the grim cynicisms of Mary Wortley Montagu 
that the only reason she was glad she was a woman was 
that, being so, she would not have to marry one of her 
own sex. It is well for masculine girls to remember 
that most men do not desire to marry one of their 
own sex. 

The fact of the case is that the girls of this genera- 



GIRLHOOD, 171 

tion need to be constantly guarded against a false con- 
ception of girlhood. If the uniform testimony of 
foreigners is to be credited, the American girl is a 
diflFerent being from that of other civilized nations. 

A gentleman who has lived much abroad and whose 
sympathies are all with this, his native country, tells 
me that the average American girl on her travels is 
viewed with wonder and surprise. Forward, pert, 
supercilious, negligent of the tastes and customs of 
others, she is remarked upon as immodest and shallow- 
brained. Two young girls, riding in Paris, come along 
the Champs £lysees to a spot where a band is playing. 
They stop the cab, alight, and begin to waltz there and 
then, before an amazed and delighted street concourse. 
They are Americans, showing their superiority to social 
forms, as social forms are in Paris. They are from the 
boundless land of prairies and freedom. There is great 
danger from such an example, from such a reputation 
as we are held in abroad. 

It is the very highest duty that you can render your 
country and yourself to frown upon such infringements 
of your purity and maidenly reserve, and in yourself, 
and in all your influence, restore the girlhood of sweet, 
modest, blushing delicacy, the most beautiful and 
attractive of all the flowers that grow. 

PUEPOSE. 

Next to modesty — under which title I intend to 
include all the graces of a passive girlhood — I would 
enforce upon you the necessity of purpose in your life. 
It is a very lamentable thing that most girls grow up 



172 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

witli no more definite object than the lily. I suppose 
if tlie lily had a consciousness it would say to itself, 
'^ I hope I shall grow up pretty, and then, perhaps, 
some man will pluck me, and I shall not be left to 
wither on the stalk/^ In the same way, I take it, the 
one real definite purpose in the minds of most girls is 
marriage. What is the chief end of woman? To 
marry. Well, I believe it is. There is certainly no 
higher possible condition to which she can aspire than 
that of wife and mother. It is her normal destiny. 
But whether you are going to marry or not, you ought 
to have some aim in life which will not be hindered 
either by marriage or old maidhood. Do you know I 
think the reason that old maids are, in the popular 
literature, called sour and cross is very easy to find ? I 
do not, of course, believe they are so any more than 
any other class. I have the greatest sympathy with 
them as a maligned and misrepresented set. They and 
mothers-in-law ought to be able to recover at common 
law for libel against the world at large. But when 
you do find a confirmed case of sourness and bitterness 
in the person of marriageable years yet unmated, study 
the subject a little and see whose fault it is, and how 
it came about. As a young girl she had no other 
object given her, no more definite purpose, than mar- 
riage. That lay before her the crown and sceptre of 
her life. Never mind this, and never mind that ; she 
would not need them after she was married. All her 
time w^as put into the various little accomplishments 
which are regarded as means, not ends. Unlike her 
brothers, who were instructed from the very beginning 



GIRLHOOD. 173 

to aim at something useful and to regard matrimony 
as an accident, which might or might not happen, she 
was trained and inspired with one only ambition. Well, 
something happened, or rather did not, and you have a 
whole life wrecked. She may have had twenty offers 
of marriage and found none to suit her. But there 
she is at the end of girlhood, fitted for nothing but 
marriage, and still single. It is just as if a boy were 
to be kept for twenty years learning to be a machinist, 
not taught anything else, not allowed to consider any- 
thing else, and at the end of that time, when his days 
of study were over, should find every machine-shop in 
the world resolutely set against employing him. His 
life has been wasted. All his training is useless. With 
any great number of such cases you might find as 
much sourness and bitterness as are sometimes attrib- 
uted to other disappointments. 

Take any number of young girls from sixteen years 
to twenty, and is it not true that nearly every one of 
them is purposeless, aimless, waiting to see which way 
the tides setting out of the future will whirl her ? And 
yet put those same girls beside their brothers of the 
same age, and you will find the girls have as much or 
more aptitude in general learning, as much or more 
brilliancy of perception, certainly more intuitive and 
sympathetic natures. It would seem that there is 
nothing for which the boy aims for which the girl 
may not prepare herself. 

Each of them, boy and girl, looks forward to mar- 
riage as a possibility; but beyond that why cannot you 
girls, like the boys, look forward to doing something 

15^ 



174 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

and being something as a result of your present efforts? 
You have some one faculty better than another ; you 
are marked by the Creator with a tendency which you 
should strive to discover and develop. God never 
made one of you without intending you should fill 
some particular niche in the universe. There may be 
ten millions of others attempting to fill it, but it is 
yours ; it will be empty until you step into it. Your 
purpose is to find that niche and fill it. It may be as 
a literary character, a furnisher of thought, as a news- 
paper correspondent, as a hospital nurse, as a salesman, 
as a milliner, as a committeeman in many charities, as 
the secretary of a sewing society, or as a simple peace- 
maker in society. It may be any one of ten thousand 
other things, but it is some one thing. Now, suppose 
you take music lessons. In a half-dozen lessons you 
will know whether you have struck your appointed 
line. You will know whether you have the music in 
yourself and are trying to get it out, or whether you 
are perfectly destitute of it and helping your teacher 
to pump it in. It is either an inspiration or a merely- 
mechanical exercise of memory. Some girls, however, 
are kept at it at vast expense year after year, and at 
last have no more music than when they began. They 
have crammed all they know. They have not edu- 
cated themselves, for education means drawing out 
what is in them ; but they have stuck on an artificial 
accomplishment, and every good judge detects the arti- 
fice. Not that it is a bad thing to attempt music even 
mechanically, if you do not lose application in your 
peculiar line. But while you are thumping at a piano 



GIRLHOOD. 175 

or strummiDg at a harp, you might be growing rapidly 
in your natural directions. I know it is very difficult 
to determine in any o^se what you shall do or shall 
not do, but there are some things that seem very plain. 
There is nothing so marvellous in biographical history 
as the way in which greatness has had to struggle to be 
great in its own way. A spiritual, high-souled boy, 
who from the very first-expressed word has shown that 
God made him for a poet or preacher, has had to 
fight against being made a butcher or baker. A great 
heavy-jawed, thick-lipped, under-headed, unemotional 
boy, who loves to be in the shambles and at the dog- 
fights, is caught up by fond parents, and finds himself 
in the ministry or grinding out poetry. As it is with 
boys who are not allowed to grow up into natural use- 
fulness, but are put into an educational lathe and turned 
out doctors, lawyers, preachers, or mechanics or artists, 
to order, so it is to a much greater degree with girls. 
They are taken in hand and squeezed into such shapes 
as their parents think look best. Now, look into your 
own nature, each of you young girls, and ask yourself 
what is the dominant tendency in you ; what do you 
take to most eagerly in your studies, in your duties, in 
your amusements ? If I do not mistake, you will find 
that these are all held together by one invisible bond, 
which is the secret of your strength. There is one 
study which is a pleasure, and it runs itself, without 
your being aware of it, into amusement and daily 
routine. In Raphael it was the study of art; in 
Whitney, of mechanics; in Beethoven, of music; in 
St. Paul, of God ; in Mary, of contemplative religion ; 



176 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

in Martha, of domestic order ; in Dorcas, of charity ; 
in Florence Nightingale, of human suffering. Every 
real life, every great life, has one germ and centre — like 
the star-fish — nourished from every side, taking food 
all around the circumference of its being, yet it carries 
everything to a common centre, where its living, ani- 
mating purpose is. 

So far as you have the choice, then, do not trim your 
life into an unnatural shape, as men trim a parterre to 
make it attractive. Perhaps you love the study of 
history. Well, why cannot you be another Miss 
Strickland ? Make history your object, study its phi- 
losophy and current, and you may be very useful to 
the world entirely aside from any maternal duties you 
may have. Perhaps you are fond of rhetoric and com- 
position. Why may you not strive for usefulness in 
the line adorned by Hannah More, S6vign6, or George 
Eliot? Perhaps you love to study art. Why may 
you not find a vocation here, and rest your arm against 
Harriet Hosmer's or your easel against Rosa Bonheur's ? 
Perhaps you have the musical afflatus. A purpose to 
succeed there need not fail when you remember what 
Nilsson or Camilla Urso and many women have done. 
Think of any one great and noble purpose, and if you 
feel it in you, you will see successful women walking 
in it before you. No matter if you do not become as 
great and famous as they have been ; work, strive to 
tread upon their heels. But animate your lives with a 
purpose of some kind. Put a candle in your lantern, 
and keep it burning and shining. 

I am not going to say what vocations a woman may 



GIRLHOOD. 177 

or may not follow, but it seems to me that there is not 
any on the earth where women could not get along as 
well as the majority of men now employed in it, and I 
believe there is as much a divine calling to one thing 
as to another. A man is called of God to be a good 
laAV}^er as well as a good preacher, and yet it is clear 
that God does not always call clients to the lawyer or 
congregations to the preacher. And I never have been 
able to see why a young girl who has an intense convic- 
tion that she ought to enter a profession should not do 
so. She couldn't fail worse than half the men do. 
But aside from that debatable ground, there is the one 
great truth that you ought to have some stimulating 
purpose in all you do. What is the reason in the na- 
ture of things that, after breakfast, the boys pick up 
the morning paper and the girls pick up the latest 
novel ? Why do boys take to politics and base-ball, 
and talk about the doings of men yesterday all over 
the country, while girls talk about Amaryllis and 
Francesco, and wonder whether Almira is going really 
to marry Percival or take Ronaldo back ? Isn't it be- 
cause boys expect to be in the real world some day and 
must begin to get posted, while the girls are apt to 
live in an unreal world of expectations and possibili- 
ties, and look at the course of political events, elections, 
rise and fall of statesmen, discussions of great issues, 
and all that, just in the way they look at the Zulu war, 
entirely removed from them, touching their life no- 
where ? My experience leads me to the conclusion that 
most young girls are as ignorant of the politics of 
to-day in our country as they are of the campaign in 
7n 



178 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

Zuliiland. Stand a hundred up in a row and ask them 
wlio is the chief justice of the United States, who 
are Oliio's senators in Congress, which party and what 
principles are in power in the national or State govern- 
ment, and you will see what an ideal life they are living. 
After the heat of this campaign, when every paper for 
three months had been full of political information, and 
you didn't hear anything but Ewing and Foster, I heard 
a very intelligent lady say that her husband laughed at 
her because she supposed that Mr. Foster was running 
for county commissioner, and on my telling this as a 
good specimen of ignorance, I elicited from another 
intelligent lady that she was confident that Foster was 
the Democratic candidate for governor. 

While you are seeking some greater purpose, let me 
commend to you a resolution to acquaint yourself with 
the world in which you live, to read up upon the con- 
struction and management of the government under 
which you live, and to get some conception of the 
questions and men which are foremost to-day. Don't 
let the unreal world of the novel assume the place of 
the real world which grows your bread and butter. 
That phrase, bread and butter, is a good one to commit 
to memory. It means a great deal. It stands for a 
whole range of prosaic and ordinary ideas which need 
to be pushed forward. 

The men of our generation have been too much given 
to the bread-and-butter side of life. They have very 
nearly forgotten the ideal and spiritual parts of human 
nature. But you young girls, as a class, can't be justly 
charged with erring in that direction. The concurrence 



GIRLHOOD. 179 

of many Influences has made you thoroughly unpracti- 
cal. During the awful distresses of France, just before 
the Revolution of 1789, one of the brightest young 
women of the court was told of some great suffering in 
a cottage, and asked what was the trouble. '^ The 
poor man has six children, and has no bread,^^ was the 
answer. " Well,'^ said this estimable and practical 
young lady, with great sympathy, " why do they not 
eat cake, then f^ There was the same deplorable ig- 
norance of the real toiling^ bread-and-butter world 
which is so common to-day. 

A hundred years ago our grandmothers were studying 
cook-books and whirling spinning-wheels, and working 
with a purpose, when they got through the schooling of 
those days and reached sixteen or seventeen years of 
age. But now, when school-days are gone, all over the 
country our bright young girls, having finished their 
education, as the saying is, sit down to wait for the 
days when the princes shall come and start them into 
real life in the enchanted palaces. Your life is one 
of aimlessness, of waiting, and you were certainly not 
meant to be included among those of whom Milton 
says,— 

" They also serve who only stand and wait.*' 

Of all the periods of your life this absorbing, cres- 
cent, plastic age is the very one which you can least 
afford to waste. At sixteen your acquiring faculties 
can learn more in an hour than they can learn in a day 
at thirty. The warm wax takes easily the impression 
of the seal ; to wait is to have it harden into greater 



180 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

and greater obduracy. Put the seal and stamp of some 
great purpose into the warm and plastic character tliat 
you now have. Read for a purpose, not simply to kill 
time. Study, write, inquire, think, speak, act, with an 
end in view of getting all your joowers into action and 
becoming a force in the world. Bend your wishes to it. 
■And now let me close with some general suggestions : 
Be content to enjoy some things a little less that you 
may have greater health and endurance. The present 
modes of dress will not permit you to be very sensible, 
but be as sensible as you can in adjusting the weights 
and the protection of your clotlies. Take plenty of 
exercise. Regard that as the first duty of your life. 
Don't get thoroughly heated in a ball-room and then 
rush out into the open air. Don't make candy the 
main article of your diet, diversified with a little meat 
and vegetable. I sometimes feel as if the law ought 
to be invoked against the manufacture of sweetmeats. 
The amount of this slow poison that is consumed is 
fearful. And I rather think the most of it is eaten by 
young girls, whose appetites are thereby destroyed for 
the substantial food that their growing bodies need. 
Make up your mind that for every novel you read you 
will read an equal amount at least in some useful direc- 
tion. When you choose a novel, take it as you would 
buy a picture, — for its merit and power, not because it 
is the last thing out. Some novels educate and instruct. 
Such are Scott's, Bulwer's, Dickens's, and Thackeray's. 
So much cannot be said of most novels of to-day. They 
are syllabub, and act on the mind as candy does on the 
body. I can't conceive of a more lamentable condition 



GIRLHOOD. 181 

than that of a young girl on a bright summer day with 
a box of candy and a copy of '^Eed as a Rose is She/^ 
But many of you can, I suppose. If I might say one 
thing further, I would humbly suggest that most books 
do not derive any additional value from pencilled an- 
notations on the margin, and that when you feel called 
on to applaud or condemn any particular passage in a 
library book, you make a severe struggle with yourself 
until you overcome the propensity. 

In conclusion, I wish very seriously to remind you 
of your responsibilities to God and your fellow-men. 
God has put you in a position where you must be an 
example and a guide to boys, who are not given so 
spiritual a nature. In that critical time which every 
boy has to pass through between the time that he ceases 
to be under his parents' direct tutelage and the time 
when he begins to be a responsible man himself, there 
is no influence bearing on him for his good or bad 
which can for a moment be compared to yours. In 
all his moods you can be his Mentor. A word from 
you may turn his life as a rock turns the whirling 
river-current. Your being is the complement of his. 
Stronger than teacher, preacher, master, or parent, 
your young hands hold the wand which may make 
him a noble or a dwarf. I beg you to think of this, 
and by the simplicity of your faith, and the firmness 
of your religious life, draw him upward to the hope 
that is in Christ as by the modesty and innocence of 
your life you make him love the pure and the true. 
The basis of true womanhood is in her union with 
God. The maiden of Galilee incarnated the Son of 

16 



182 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

God and ennobled all her sex. She is your type for- 
ever, in that she was the chosen one to make Christ 
manifest to the world. Your responsibility is upon 
you. You are your brother's keeper ; you may know 
the pleasure of converting a sinner from the error of 
his ways and hiding a multitude of sins. 



WIFEHOOD. 

A LECTURE addressed to women bearing the rela- 
tions of wife will, of course, regard their duties and 
position towards the husband. With the many other 
questions of home management and woman^s sphere 
beyond the defined limits of the husband and wife, I 
have nothing to do to-night. What is the wifehood 
which God intended? AVhat are the things which 
ennoble, and what are the things which degrade, the 
wife? What are the elements which must exist in 
her to make her that which the highest interests not 
only of herself and husband, but of society and the 
world, demand that she should be ? Of course, it does 
not need that I should say even by implication that 
the highest purity and fidelity to the marriage-vow are 
essential to the true wife. Whatever else men have 
differed about, from the days of the ancient world 
marrying and giving in marriage there has never been 
any divergence of opinion as to this matter, that the 
very highest interests of the state and society hang 
upon a strict fulfilment of the marital obligations. 
The seventh commandment, spoken amid the thunders 
of Sinai, had been already impressed upon the con- 
sciousness of the race, and all the hopes of future 
stability, of property interests, of human affections and 

sincerity, as well as of eternal happiness, depend upon 

183 



184 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

the strict obedience of this law. The lecture which is 
addressed to wives may presume that they are wives, 
and speak of the virtues and attributes which, as they 
have them or lack them, make them to differ as one 
star differs from another star in glory. 

So important is the position of any wife, so exalted 
the dignity which she bears, so sacred the tie with 
which God and man have bound her to her husband, 
that he of old, although the mightiest man upon the 
earth, belittled the subject, sunk the ocean in a drop, 
when he said that Caesar's wife must be above sus- 
picion. Higher than the royal diadem which Cal- 
phurnia was offered by the Roman populace is the 
crown of wifehood which she wore in common with a 
million others. In the palace or in the cottage, in the 
splendid halls where the tribute of a hundred nations 
was daily poured with lavish hands at the feet of hira 
whom she called husband and all the w^orld besides 
called master, or in the swineherd's hut among the 
Apennines, where man and beast alike were fed upon 
the autumnal bounty of the acorn-dropping oaks, 
wherever stepped a wife^ she was a sister and equal of 
Calphurnia in the royalty which was ancient when the 
Csesars rose, and is yet young when their dynasty is 
buried under the ruins of many others. It is this 
mightier unction of an eternal queenship w^hich gives 
a force to Csesar's narrow truth. She should be above 
suspicion not because she was Caesar's, but because she 
was a wife. 

When we use or hear the expression '^ a good wife," 
what is the idea which it raises in the mind? what 



WIFEHOOD. 185 

qualities does it suggest as necessary to such a char- 
acter ? They are many, and really difficult to analyze 
and state. A good wife is like a good picture: the 
better it is the harder it is to describe. The artist who 
stands before a poor picture will instantly point out 
the reasons why it is bad. Its faults are glaring. But 
put him before a landscape of Corot or a figure-piece 
of Le Febvre, and just in proportion as he appreciates 
the truth and beauty of the art will he be baffled in 
telling its merits. You cannot tell it ; all you can do 
is to say, " Look, there it is, — that is the perfect thing.'' 
So in attempting to mention in detail any one of the 
many qualities of an ideal wife, one is apt to weaken 
the general effect which the words themselves produce. 
Certain qualities are exaggerated, others are forgotten, 
and the picture described is not the picture which the 
mind creates. But as artists have to study the skeleton 
before they can make the picture and know something 
of the main parts of the structure, and where the 
strength is behind the beauty, so we may perhaps find 
some qualities to dw^ell upon in discussing the wife 
which are concealed by, and yet uphold the body of, 
her fame and beauty. 

Perhaps there is no better word under which to 
group many virtues together than the word 

DOMESTICITY. 

1. The good wife must find her life's centre in her 
home. However much she may enjoy social life, how- 
ever much she may be pleased with current amuse- 
ments, she must regard these as secondary to the 

16^ 



186 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

pleasures and the duties of her own and her husband's 
home. 

There is such a thing as being too much shut up, 
of being so engrossed in home duties as to neglect or 
ignore the other demands of life. It is a most per- 
nicious thing. The social qualities in us all were im- 
planted by God, and if they be stunted and starved 
we rob ourselves of just so much of the fulness of our 
possibilities. Every wife ought to feel it her duty to 
mingle with the world outside her home, and bring 
back with her all she can of the freshness and novelty 
of change. The most delightful home on earth will 
become monotonous and the best disposition soured or 
disappointed if the walls of this home shut in the 
horizon on every side, and all the earth be narrowed 
to its dimensions. You remember the story of Eas- 
selas. The beautiful valley had all the joys and de- 
lights of earth within it, but he only began to appreciate 
them when he had been away from them and seen the 
greater and drearier world outside. While shut up 
within its mountains and confined to its narrow life 
he was ever sighing, ever miserable, because he knew 
that there were people like himself beyond the blue 
hazy mountains, and he longed to be with them, to 
know them, to love them. Now, your home is narrower 
even than the happy valley. 

The tranquillity and freshness of your life will de- 
pend upon the new elements of contentment which you 
gather from without. You must touch the rushing 
waters of human interests every day, or else languish 
and decay. If you have the notion that your duties 



WIFEHOOD. 187 

are so arduous and pressing that you cannot find time 
to go out from day to day and that you must be at 
home, you ought to remember that the doing of to- 
day's work must not outweigh the work of many days 
to come. The machinery designed to last for many 
years must not be overstrained for a trifle. All about 
you are people on whom you ought to lean, from whom 
you ought to gather strength and encouragement and 
information, and the ripeness of your usefulness will 
depend much upon the way you use these divine props 
and helps. Shut yourself up from society, keep your 
life down to the whirling grindstone of petty care, of 
routine duty, see no one but your husband and house- 
hold, and it is marvellous how rapidly you will grow 
old and morbid. Did you ever notice the difference 
between the plants that are just on the brink of a 
stream and those that are about two inches too high to 
be benefited by the moisture? Although the one be 
but a slight distance from the other, yet because it is 
touched by the living current it is fresh and green and 
buoyant, and because the other is not so touched it is 
dry and yellow and seedy. Moving life, living move- 
ment, are as much factors of our life as of the animals 
and plants. There are withered and shrivelled women 
who are so because they have vainly thought that they 
have reservoirs of freshness in themselves and need 
not be replenished from the life of others. 

Domesticity does not mean isolation, a giving up of 
the outer world, but it means this, — that the world out- 
side of the house is regarded as a great park or pleasure- 
garden into which the wife may go to gather the means 



188 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

of making her home fresher and more beautiful. She 
enjoys everything, and is all the time thinking of the 
added glories of her home when she goes back to it 
with hands full of fragrant flowers and veins pulsing 
with fresher life. With her there is nothing on earth 
to be compared for a moment with home and husband. 
They are the central sun around which all the universe 
of her being swings, but for the very reason that they 
are so much to her she strives to keep herself ever as 
fitted for them as when she first called them hers. She 
leaves home at times that she may come to it again with 
the zest of change and variation. Now, this is very 
different from the case of some wives, who regard their 
homes as dungeons and grasp every opportunity to go 
from them, as St. Peter grasped the angel, glad to get 
out even while he wist not where he was going. The 
difference between the cases lies in the different con- 
ceptions of home ; it is in the way in which two hearts 
are united to it. If you think of your home as a cage 
whose bars are yet bars even if golden, and if you flutter 
from it with the sense of a freed prisoner and go back 
to it with the feeling of a snared bird, you will make 
it in reality the dreariest spot on earth not only for 
yourself, but for your husband. Everything is limited 
here in our life. Even space itself, infinite as we call 
it, may be thought of and moaned over as a prison 
shutting us in and making us prisoners. I do not 
think of the ark as the pleasantest of habitations 
while the waters covered the earth, and yet the dove 
beat its way back with glad speed to this its home, 
bringing with it the gleanings of a reappearing earth. 



WIFEHOOD. 189 

However dreary an ark your home may be, it will be 
only the more so if you go out and gather what the 
earth can give and then reluctantly turn again to it, a 
prison-ship desolate and alone on the waters. But un- 
less everything in experience is at fault, you may make 
it the happiest and sweetest spot you ever saw if you 
are diligent to bring into it the olive-branches of hope 
and joy which you went out to find. And by domes- 
ticity I mean, too, the habit of doing the household 
routine as a pleasure, not as a penalty. A woman who 
really loves her home looks at the little things of duty 
just as an engraver looks at the little touches of his 
tool upon the plate, — with an abiding pleasure in 
watching their effect and an eager desire to see that 
they bring out his idea into beauty. Suppose Carl 
Miiller, when he w^anted to engrave the Holy Family, for 
instance, had said to himself at the beginning, '' Here 
is a great deal of insignificant small cutting to do before 
the figures begin to appear. I will turn this over and 
let my apprentice do this. When he gets the little 
rubbishy detail work executed, I will take the plate 
and do the great design.^^ We should never have had 
the Holy Family. We all see at once that it is the 
little detail work that determines the engraving ; it is 
the important part of the work. 

The plate Avhen it is finished is nothing but a unique 
combination of details. Well, that is just what perfect 
housewifery is, — a beautiful completion of hundreds 
of little things, each done faithfully and lovingly, with 
the devotion of an artist who has no higher ambition 
on earth than the successful result of her efforts. She 



190 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

can take as much pleasure, if it be her business, in 
dusting a parlor, as Miiller in the use of his burin. 
When she sits down to sew, she finds just as much in- 
spiration in working out the problem of making her 
home happy by doing so small a thing as putting on 
a button as Reynolds had in painting one on some of 
his fine portraits. In either case, hers or Reynolds's, 
the thing which is needed to bring the work into com- 
pletion is a button; and so he puts it on with his brush, 
and she puts it on with her needle. She does every- 
thing in the line of her duty with the pleasure of a life 
that is working normally. Now, contrast this with the 
case of a wife who looks at household cares as evils, 
and as so many trials upon her patience and good na- 
ture. As her highest enjoyments are external to her 
domestic duties, these duties are always thrusting them- 
selves in upon her as thorns, fretting and irritating her. 
A button has to be put on, and she turns to do it pite- 
ously, complaining that she doesn't do anything but 
sew from morning till night. The dust piles up so 
that she can't get through it without noticing it, and 
then it is cleaned up, and the husband is called on to 
know that she doesn't get her apron off from morning 
till night. Everything goes wrong because she has not 
the domestic instinct. She does not think of her home 
duties primarily, and they must be done primarily ; and 
so she and the duties carry on a long skirmishing war, 
in which she is always surrendering at last, and doing 
finally and grumblingly wha't she ought to have done 
at first cheerfully. I imagine this is the trouble in a 
great many families in which there is perfect affection 



WIFEHOOD. 191 

and congeniality, but the wife does not make home the 
centre of her life, and so throws everything a little 
out of regularity and there is constant jarring. You 
know how the complications of a whole machine-shop 
depend upon the accuracy with which two cog-wheels 
turn upon each other. If one wheel hangs back even 
a second, there is a jar throughout the whole machinery. 
That exemplifies what I am saying as to the domestic 
instinct in wives, and in husbands too, of course. There 
is such a thing as doing everything in its time and place, 
by making domestic details a duty and pleasure, and 
thus having the household run smoothly and efficiently ; 
and there is such a thing as doing everything just a 
second too late by making home a secondary thought, 
and thus having the household constantly jarring and 
destroying peace with its rattle and noise. 

There is a most affecting and beautiful description 
of a true wife in her domestic duties given in the 
thirty-first chapter of Proverbs which ought to be 
read and pondered. Making allowance for the differ- 
ent circumstances of that age and climate and our own, 
any wife may well seek to imitate the ideal wife of the 
days of Solomon. There is no finer conception of true 
wifehood outlined in ancient or modern literature, and 
it is in itself an argument for the inspiration and di- 
vinity of the book that records it. I regard this qual- 
ity of domesticity as so important in the character of 
a wife that it may be said to make or mar her. As 
she has it, she makes a tenement a home. If you 
think a moment, you will see that the husband's home 
is really the product of the wife. It is spun from her 



192 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

nature. It is the cocoon into which her life-labor is 
continually weaving itself. 

So much brick and mortar and slate and plaster 
make a house, so much furniture and carpet and 
other things make it habitable ; but the one thing 
which makes it a home to the husband is a wife. She 
is its spirit, its living, working, organizing principle. 
She is to it what the unseen life is to the tree, without 
which the tree is merely timber and bark and leaf, and 
with which it is ever increasing and varying its beauty, 
drinking in the elements of perpetuity and growth 
from earth and sky and sea. 

2. Let me now turn to one other great cluster of 
wifely qualities, which may be grouped under the word 

ADAPTABILITY. 

The original institution of marriage may throw light 
upon the meaning which I attach to this word. The 
man was first made, and afterwards the woman. She 
was to be to him a helpmeet. In the Hebrew the term 
translated helpmeet signifies a counterpart, — signifies 
exactly that relation which the stamped image in wax 
bears to the stamp that made it. The wife was to be 
so nicely adapted to the nature of the husband and he 
to the wife's that they should be two halves, forming 
one perfect unit. Each should be the complement of 
the other, and each should be incomplete, a fraction, 
without the other. This is the ideal marriage. Now, 
when ten thousand artificial requirements are thrust by 
society upon the young people who are to marry, it is 
easy to see that in the majority of cases perhaps tliere 



WIFEHOOD. 193 

will not be that complete sympathy and entire merging 
of individuality into the one flesh on the part of the 
twain who become one. There is no need of lamenting 
over the want of proper discrimination in marriage. 
Dr. Johnson was of the opinion that there would be 
more happiness if the lord chancellor were to choose 
a wife for every man, and determine the matter with- 
out reference to the wishes of the parties. However 
that may be, it is certainly one of the first duties of a 
wife to adapt herself as she best can to the tastes, dis- 
positions, and nature of her husband. The same obliga- 
tion is upon him, — perhaps to a greater extent, because 
the woman^s nature is apt to be the finer and the wor- 
thier. They must strive by art to produce the ideal 
union which was intended by God in marriage. Let 
me give some instances of what I mean. We will 
suppose that you are by nature of a very religious 
tendency. The realities of another world are infinitely 
precious to you. You derive most of the comfort of 
your life from a rest and peace with God. You have 
married, and find your husband utterly unsympathetic 
in the matter. He has no fondness for religion. It 
takes no hold upon him. You are worlds asunder in 
the deeps of your souls. Your lives touch at the 
top, but yawn apart down in the hidden recesses of 
your life. Now, what I mean by adaptability in such 
a case as this is not becoming like him, abandoning 
your God and your hope, but fitting yourself to make 
him happy in spite of the diversity and antagonism. 
The only way in which you can ever marry his soul to 
yours is by drawing him closer and closer to the warm 
in 17 



194 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

heart of your religious faith, as he sees how sweet 
and pure and brave it makes you in life trials. You 
adapt yourself to his defects by making your corre- 
sponding virtues stronger. You make the integer by 
yourself supplying an excess where he falls short. 
Suppose you begin another way, and give him coffee 
and creed for breakfast, and soup and theology for 
dinner, and toast and eternal punishment for supper, 
and refresh him at night with extracts from Jonathan 
Edwards; it will not be long before you are as far from 
a perfect union as sulphuric acid and iron filings. You 
cannot pour religion into a man as you can put water 
into a tank, but you may by sweetness and common 
sense, and by the unselfishness of your life in the service 
of God, reach down to the roots of his heart, where, 
unknown to him, are buried the germs of his own re- 
ligious nature, and so start them into a free and healthy 
development of their own capsulate life. Religion has 
as much its own seed to spring from as any plant, and 
can no more grow without it than any plant. You 
must strive to make your husband grow by his own 
grace and into his own religious shape, and not be charg- 
ing him with your own individual ideas. Now take 
another case. You have been brought up in a rather 
puritan atmosphere, and by the law of contrarities, 
which so often obtains, your husband is rather a free 
liver, fond of his amusements and cigars and wines. 

Now, I cannot help thinking that the true duty of 
the wife is to adjust herself to her disappointment and 
be so much closer to her husband in every moment of 
his life that he must in time begin to ask how he can 



WIFEHOOD. 195 

clear away the few things which lie as obstacles to a 
perfect marriage. Love begets love, and love only can 
weld two beings together. After a while, it may be 
years, a true man who is thus married to a wife and 
knows that she does not like his habits, but sees, too, 
how very considerate and thoughtful and sweet she has 
been to him, will begin to think that such a woman is 
worth giving up something for, and then some day that 
couple will celebrate their second and real wedding, 
where their souls are joined together in the ideal mar- 
riage. The wife has gained her husband by adapting 
herself to a disappointment and seeking to remove its 
cause. Well, you say, think how much misery she 
may endure all the time, especially if her husband be 
an inebriate and a roui. But I am supposing that she 
must endure something. There is only to leave him 
or live with him, and I am saying how she may best 
endure that under which she suffers and how best cor- 
rect it. Of course there is another method of going 
to work. You may try to make him throw off the 
cloak of bad or disagreeable habits not by the gentle, 
loving power of the sun, but by the harsher and 
swifter method of the storm. Every cigar will be a 
text and every glass of wine a whole chapter, and you 
may raise such an inquisition into his life that you can 
expose the whole current of it, but, after all, I doubt 
whether in the majority of cases you will make him 
better or your home happier. Under such processes 
love melts away. You cut the only cord by which you 
might draw him. He sits across the little breakfast- 
table from you, but it isn^t the table, but deserts and 



196 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

continents, that separate you. He begins sullenly to 
retaliate uj)on your curiosity and hectoring by doing 
what he pleases more than ever, and you become two 
warring principles tied together by law. 

Whenever I consider the two ways of influencing 
men, — by gentleness and by wrath, — I am reminded of 
a story of the old slavery days. There were two Abo- 
litionist lecturers — an old Quaker and a young man — 
who travelled together, making speeches for the good 
cause. Wherever they spoke the Quaker would make 
the first speech and always secured respectful hearing ; 
but when the young man followed him, he uniformly 
elicited hisses and cat-calls and eggs, and such other 
expressions of disapproval as were common in those 
days. After enduring this thing for some time, he 
laid the matter before the Quaker and asked him how 
it was that they were so differently treated. They 
spoke on the same subject, they agreed in their convic- 
tions, and yet were uniformly treated differently. The 
old man answered him with a wisdom that commends 
itself; he said, ^'It is because thee always tells them 
how wicked they are, and how much they ought to be 
ashamed and punished ; and I tell them how good they 
might be, and how much reward they may receive.^^ 
I didn't hear the arguments made by these individuals, 
but I will warrant the Quaker made more converts 
and kept his clothes and skin least damaged. 

Just think of the way in which a wife's character 
may change in a few weeks, to the amazement of her 
husband. Just before marriage she treats him as if he 
could not err. When he wants to smoke, nobody 



WIFEHOOD. 197 

must light his cigar but herself. The last glass of wine 
is spoken of as a jest. Now, after three or four weeks 
or months, she cannot expect much effect from scolding 
the habit or lamenting its influence upon the lace 
curtains or furniture. He sees that the curtains are 
not more susceptible to aromas than they were before, 
and that four weeks or months have not changed the 
crop of Havana tobacco from entire goodness to utter 
vileness. I wonder if there would not be a longer 
life to many a honeymoon if the wife were as consid- 
erate and sweet towards the husband as she was to the 
lover ? 

Again I say I am not speaking to husbands now. If 
I were, I can think of a whole ocean of similar advice 
to pour in here. Everything that makes selfishness is 
latent in man to a greater extent than in woman. But 
I am considering the case of wives only, and so think 
of this selfishness as it exists in them. 

Consider the quality of adaptability now with refer- 
ence not to the husband, but to the circumstances and 
changes of domestic life. The advice of St. Paul is 
very good, — to be content in any state in which you may 
find yourself. A real sensible wife can make her home 
cheerful and happy by cheerfully and happily adapting 
her desires to her husband^s means. When he has five 
hundred dollars a year, she narrows all her ambitions, 
and does her best to get all the pleasures for her home 
which can be squeezed out of five hundred dollars. 
As he gets richer or poorer she adapts everything to 
the change. But the way she does it is by being con- 
tented with the condition and style of living which 

17^ 



198 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

the income affords. When she begins to contrast her 
home with richer and more elegant ones, and to sigh 
for this thing and that thing which one of her old 
school-fellows has in her handsome home, she is begin- 
ning to sow thorns in her heart and home. Suppose 
you have a cosy, comfortable home, with everything 
that is necessary to the comfort of life. You know 
your husband's circumstances, and you know they will 
not admit with prudence of much increase in outlay. 
I sincerely believe that the greatest part of earth's real 
happiness is to be found in just such homes, where 
comforts, but not luxuries, are attainable. But you 
will not have a share in that happiness unless you are 
contentedly adapted to the life. If you come in to 
your neat, modest little home and love it better than 
any grandeur and splendor you have seen in calling 
upon your friends, — love it because it is yours and your 
husband's and is the highest possible expression of 
the love you bear one another, — then you have adapta- 
bility as a virtue. But if you come in, and throw your 
gloves down, and sink into a chair, and tell your hus- 
band you will be perfectly miserable unless you can 
have a placque like Mrs. Blank's, or a colored waiter, 
or a coupe, or a new rug, or a fall bonnet, you will be 
lacking in good sense and in character. You are sigh- 
ing for the unattainable, and you might as well sulk 
because you cannot have one of the Pleiades for a 
hair ornament. Your husband can give you so much ; 
if by blandishments you secure more, you are making 
him risk everything. You are bringing into the house 
the mighty care of debt, and jeopardizing everything 



WIFEHOOD. 199 

for trifles which your reason tells you are not necessary 
to home. 

My mind turns to the perfect happiness of Traddles 
and his Sophia, who were all ready for housekeeping 
because they had the neatest little marble-topped table 
in the world, and although they had not another thing 
on earth they put this table into a million combinations, 
and foresaw it would answer many demands. That is 
the spirit of adaptability. From such little things the 
home gradually grows, and I could take you to many 
rich houses in this city, where the people who live 
luxuriantly and happily in it will point with pride to 
some old-fashioned chair or table or bureau, and tell 
you how happy they were to buy that thing in the 
early and narrow days of an early but not narrow 
love ; and I think they turn away from it to silks and 
Turkish rugs, which prosperity and later years have 
brought, with something of pathos in their hearts, as 
if a hand touched the chords of memory and it gave 
out the strains of forgotten melodies. 

I have no time to say to you how much farther this 
quality of adaptability runs its threads through the 
good wife^s nature, how it means amiability, cheerful- 
ness, contentment, silent suffering, voiceless anxiety. 

The figure under which our Saviour describes his 
relation to the Church is that of the marriage tie. 
Through all the centuries the struggles of civilization 
have been to attain a more perfect union between Christ 
and his Bride. As the Church is striving with all her 
power to make herself a reflection of Christ^s own 



200 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

nature, so tliat there shall be the completest harmony 
in that holy marriage, so I commend to the wives and 
to the husbands united by the same bond the spirit of 
love and joy and peace and humility, in honor pre- 
ferring one another. The questions of obedience, of 
first and second, of lord and servant, cannot arise in a 
true marriage. The perfect love which unites the hus- 
band and the wife as God designed drives out fear and 
rivalry and dual interests. Wherever the civil law 
may determine the voice and authority of the two 
united wills shall be, yet the wife speaks through the 
husband and the husband for the wife. The two may 
reverently and properly use the words of the Saviour 
to His Father, and pray that they may be one, even as 
the Father and the Son are one. In such a union 
there is no jealousy, no bickering, no struggling for 
command. 

The wife is merged in the husband and he in the 
wife, and from the correlation of their differing natures 
springs the better nature of their oneness. 



MOTHERHOOD. 

To-night we consider woman in relation to her off- 
spring, in her responsibilities and privileges towards the 
children whom she has brought into the world. The 
glories of maternity have been forever the theme of 
song and story. The ancients worshipped the repro- 
ductive principle, and so strange, so miraculous, are the 
origin and development of life that motherhood is to- 
day not only the glory but the marvel of earth. When 
we speak of the incarnation of the Son of God as the 
very highest evidence of God^s love for us, in that He 
gave His Son to be born, not of the seed of angels, but 
that He humbled Himself to be born of a Jewish vir- 
gin, we express wonder at so great a miracle. But 
while the mystery of Christmas Day is one of vast and 
overwhelming importance to us all, yet motherhood in 
general, wherein God propagates the life which was 
once in Him alone in all the universe, is the problem 
which is as unknowable as God Himself. She who is 
a mother has in her own person wrought again the 
primal miracle of Genesis. Even as God, she has 
brought life from matter and made the first creature 
of a new world. Explain this great mystery, and there 
is none left. The mystery of God is the mystery of 
life. You remember Tennyson^s words, — 

201 



202 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

*' Flower in the crannied wall, 
I pluck thee out of thy crannies, 
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
Little flower, but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and Man is." 



And these words are literally true, for there is noth- 
ing in the nature and existence of God that is more 
mysterious or more beyond finite conception than is the 
motherhood which lies behind all organic life. What 
vast, almost infinite, powers were capsulate in the first 
living cell from which the universe unfolded itself! 
What lines of life converged to one centre in her of 
whom the sacred writer speaks, " Now, Eve was the 
mother of all living and to live'^ ! The mother of to- 
day may foresee the life that she brings forth propa- 
gated through numberless generations, until mighty 
nations shall be her children in the ages that are yet to 
come. The city, the state, the nation, are the work of 
men's hands, — they are human organizations, — but the 
family, which is the type of all unions and all govern- 
ments, is the creature of God. And the woman who 
holds the sceptre in that little state, that miniature 
world, who is the author and finisher of its happiness 
and its being, must expect some responsibilities beyond 
those of ordinary womanhood. 

To her children she is bound by as many ties as they 
have faculties and needs. To her alone of all the mil- 
lions of earth's women do her children look for the 
means of perfect and symmetrical growth. Divide the 
human nature of the child into three parts, and we may 



MOTHERHOOD, 203 

easily see how much responsibility the mother has. In 
your child there are three classes of qualities which 
must be advancing together, and which pertain to him, 
as he has a body, a mind, and a soul. 

1. What is the duty of motherhood to the physical 
wants of the child ? Look back upon your childhood' 
and you will see how late you were in learning some 
of the most necessary laws of health and exercise. If 
you had not been assisted by older wisdom, you would 
have irreparably diminished your physical strength and 
health by neglect or error. The duty is upon you 
now to impart the same monition to your children, — 
to exercise upon them all such care as shall save them 
from subsequent pain and ill-health. 

Motherly affection ought not to crowd out motherly 
prudence, but to be its best spring and source. Be- 
cause children eagerly desire food which is bad for 
them, because they want to sit up at unwholesome 
hours, because they shrink from proper exercise and 
habits, there is no reason why the mother's love should 
yearn to gratify them. She loves them so deeply that 
she will not allow them to plant the seeds of future 
misery in their physical life. Her better knowledge 
penetrates beneath their shallow and evanescent wishes, 
and saves them days of pain by giving them moments 
of disappointment. 

There is much written, and there ought to be much 
read, nowadays, upon the proper care of health. Every 
mother ought to inform herself upon the primary facts 
of hygiene and strive to apply her knowledge. A child 
who comes to years of discretion in broken health or 



204 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

chronic disease, and traces it to neglect or foolish indul- 
gence in childhood, has a good grievance and a just 
charge against the affection as well as the wisdom of 
its parents. But I think many loving mothers dress 
their children more for appearance than for comfort. 
The styles of clothing for children are some of them as 
absurd as those for adults ; and that is a strong saying. 
Little bodies in which vital powers have not had time 
to seat themselves firmly are for social requirements 
subjected to changes of clothing and to exposure which 
lay deep the seeds of permanent disease. Children are 
not toys to exhibit, but little lives to nourish. 

The tremendous mortality of infants is accounted for 
by remembering that many mothers regard their chil- 
dren as capable of enduring the same amount of strain 
on physical strength as themselves. 

They want to go out in the evening and cannot leave 
the baby, and so take it with them. They eat black 
cake ; the baby cries for it, and to hush it and restore 
peace the baby gets some black cake. The bedtime of 
the child changes with its whims or with the engage- 
ments of the mother ; if it will not go to sleep when 
she wants it to, it must be sick, and Mrs. Winslow, 
who has soothed many a child into its last sleep, is 
invoked to furnish a laudanum stupor. It is marvel- 
lous how some children ever do get grown up. They 
are put through as many ordeals as any prisoner in the 
Middle Ages, and yet survive. And the strange thing 
is that many mothers think they make the child happy 
by gratifying its every wish. 

I remember once a mother telling with great pride 



MOTHERHOOD. 205 

that her little child had eaten four bananas just before 
going to bed, and had slept beautifully. Now, that is 
an accomplishment if the child is in training for a 
museum curiosity, like the sword-swallower or the 
stone-eater; but if it is only in training for healthy 
manhood, it is a serious strain to put it to. What a 
child can do in the way of digestion, and what it ought 
to be permitted to do, are two things. 

A growing child is certainly worth as much as a 
nursery man^s tree, but just see how carefully the pro- 
gress of a valuable tree is watched. Its requirements 
are studied and pondered over; its incipient disease 
checked ; its chemical elements supplied by patient 
effort; its tendency to defective growth checked by 
instantaneous application of girds and props. 

If a tree is worth all this, — a tree which to-day is 
and to-morrow is cast into the fire, — how much worthier 
is a human body, which enshrines an eternal soul ! 

The opinion that a child will grow up strong any- 
how, without reference to the kind of mother it has or 
to the treatment it has, is one that is contradicted by 
the common sense of everybody. The years of child- 
hood really shape the bodily structure according to the 
nurture and food and regular habits which the child has. 

You can make a tree grow straight or crooked, and 
you can make a normally-constituted child strong or 
sickly as you bring far-reaching love and assiduous 
self-sacrifice to the task or leave the little one to a 
Topsy-like life of unassisted development. The vir- 
tues of pure air, of fresh oxygen, are beginning to be 
appreciated more than they used to be. 

18 



206 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

But it has been a hard struggle. The generations 
which follow ours will remember it for many blessed 
inventions and improvements in social comforts, but 
for none will it be more thankful than for this, — that 
the female nature in this age began to see gleams of 
sense in the prescription of good ventilation and fre- 
quent change of air in houses. It used to be said — and 
I am apt to think with reason — that fresh air and women 
were sworn enemies. A house was kept hermetically 
sealed day after day for fear of draughts and colds, 
and the same poisonous atmosphere was again and 
again taken into the lungs. Parents and children 
slept at night with windows and doors shut tight, and 
waked in the morning in an air that was stifling. 
Furnaces poured out their blasts of hot air, and im- 
perceptibly to the inmates the temperature rose and 
rose until every particle of oxygen was burnt away 
and the blood was in fevered heat. These things have 
changed somewhat, I think and hope, and households 
have more of the constant benefit of living air. Chil- 
dren need it as much as the flowers, and it should be 
the mother's duty to see that they get it. With good 
fresh air, plain good food, cleanliness, and proper 
clothing, the child will have the main demands of its 
nature gratified, and for these it has the natural right 
to hold its parents responsible. 

2. What does the mother owe to the mind of the 
child ? Those who have studied the development of 
an infant mind must have been struck with the facility 
of its operations. It receives impressions with mar- 



MOTHERHOOD. 207 

vellous rapidity, and retains them for years. Aristotle 
used to speak of the newly-born mind as a plain 
tablet perfectly free from any inscription. Everything 
must be put upon it from outside. As the child is so 
constantly with the mother, it is from her that its first 
acquisitions must come. The primary workings of 
the reason, the perceptions, and sensations, which are 
the basis of intellectual actions, all are experienced 
under the mother^s guidance. Words dropped thought- 
lessly stimulate curiosity ; the child^s mind feeds upon 
its parentis mind. The intelligence and clearness dis- 
played in your answers to questions, the patience which 
you show in trying to explain the things which puzzle 
the little mind, are great factors in the future condition 
of that mind. Your child's mind is just as hungry as 
its body. There are a million things every day that 
are puzzles to it. It wants to know everything and 
does not know anything, and it is the mother who has 
the great privilege of taking this young mind and fur- 
nishing it the beginnings of truth. What a sacred 
duty it is ! Think of the day when Isaac Newton first 
raised a baby's face to the skies and asked wonderingly 
what the glittering star-points were. He lived to weigh 
and measure them, and declare the law by which they 
swung in their orbits, but behind the vastness of his 
knowledge there lay the simple information of his 
mother, who could not, perhaps, call one star by its 
name. Many a child who is to-day bending over its 
mother's hand, and listening with wonder to the sim- 
plest facts of our human experience, shall from these 
small seeds of knowledge, obtainable only from her, 



208 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

grow new forests of tliouglits and knowledge for man- 
kind. Tlie world of to-morrow is the child of to-day. 
The mothers of to-day are the teachers of the states- 
men, orators, philosophers, scientists, merchants, of to- 
morrow. 

You are a quiet, retired young mother. You take 
no part in the active affairs of life ; but while diffident 
of your mental powers, you are the teacher of the 
teachers of mankind. You take no part in politics, 
and yet you are the shapers of the coming statesmen. 
Pulpits are closed to you, and yet all the hopes of a 
living and active ministry for the Church of God are 
in your hands. On the Exchange your voices are not 
heard, but you are furnishing and equipping the minds 
of the merchants who shall rule that Exchange some 
day. Who so great in the beginnings of power as the 
mother? What schools or universities equal to the 
mother's lap? The great preachers whose eloquence 
and knowledge shall make men humble themselves 
before God when we are gone are lisping questions in 
your ear now. The men who shall manage the finances 
of the nation are learning from you what money is. 
Behind all the active forces of the coming world the 
mother sits upon her throne and speaks the words that 
call them into being. I like to repeat the w^ords of 
Thomas H. Benton, because they are the words of one 
who traced the effects to their cause and express a gen- 
eral truth : " All that I am my mother made me.'' 

You cannot give your child more mind than God 
allowed him, but you can stimulate and cultivate that 
mind so that it shall yield its richest harvest. You 



MOTHERHOOD. 209 

can so feed it with right thought and nourish it with 
patient care that it shall retain the trend you give it, 
even into venerable age. But this again cannot be 
done without effort and patience. She who would 
teach must know. She who seeks to impart informa- 
tion must first acquire it. The same questions which 
puzzle you from your child would puzzle a philosopher, 
because they bear upon the ordinary mysteries of being. 
Huxley or Kant could not ask or answer more difficult 
questions than a four-year-old child. Bearing these 
limitations of knowledge in mind, the mother must 
exert herself to put into the child^s mind as much of 
definite truth as possible. All it wants is to get hold 
of the ends of the threads. But to turn the child away 
with a reprimand or a laugh and no intelligible an- 
swer to his question is as unjust and severe as it would 
be to laugh at his hunger or thirst. If the question 
cannot be answered, tell him so, and tell him that you 
do not know yourself. A child asks questions as nat- 
urally as a flower drinks in dew, and the true mother 
is glad to have the little mind put its petals up to be 
filled from the showers of her knowledge. Are there 
not many mothers, however, who regard these questions 
as a sort of ordeal, and shut them off by snappish an- 
swers, like Mrs. Gargery in " Great Expectations," as 
the story is told by little Pip ? — 

^^ ^ There^s another convict off,' said Joe, as he heard 
the firing of the cannon. 

^^ ^ What does that mean V said I. 

^' ' Escaped, escaped !' said Mrs. Gargery, administer- 
ing the definition like tar-water, 
o 18* 



210 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 



"' Who's firing ?'8ald I. 



' Drat that boy !^ interposed Mrs. G., frowning at 
me. ^ What a questioner he is ! Ask no questions, 
and you will be told no lies.^ 

^^ ^ Mrs. Joe/ I said, as a last resource, ^ I should 
like to know, if you wouldn't mind, where the firing 
comes from.' 

" ' Lord bless the boy !' she exclaimed. — ^ From the 
hulks.' 

^^ ^ Oh/ I said ; ^ and please, what's hulks ?' 

" ' That's the way with this boy,' she said, pointing 
me out with her needle: ^answer him one question, 
and he'll ask you a dozen more. — Hulks are prison- 
ships.' 

"^I wonder who's put into prison-ships, and w^hy 
they're put there ?' I said in a general way, a-nd with a 
kind of desperation. 

" This was too much for Mrs. Gargery, who imme- 
diately rose. ^I tell you what, young fellow,' said 
she, ^ I didn't bring you up by hand to badger people's 
lives out. People are put into the hulks because they 
murder, and rob, and forge, and do all sorts of bad, 
and they always begin by asking questions. Now you 
get along to bed.' " 

That kind of motherhood isn't worth much to the 
world. Of course it is not expected that all women 
should be proficient in general knowledge. John 
Stuart Mill learned Greek from his mother when 
he was seven years of age. De Quincey at thirteen 
could harangue a Greek mob. It is not this kind of 
teaching that I mean, but the simple forms of knowl- 



MOTHERHOOD, 211 

edge. I mean the constant impartation in a sweet and 
kindly way of the rudiments of thought, the constant 
effort to find out what the child wants to know and to 
satisfy it, the unselfishness which keeps the mind full 
of child's thoughts and is constantly leading out the 
mental powers of the child's mind. As the child 
grows older the mother puts right reading before it, 
determines its studies, ponders upon its especial apti- 
tudes, and looks every day with eagerness to see what 
new growth has been made. I have spoken of this as 
a duty, and so it is, — the very highest duty, — but it 
ought to be a pleasure. 

To make your child look well in neatness and clean- 
liness, to see that it has well made and fitted clothes, 
cannot be as high an object as to see that it has a 
properly growing mind ; that it is being taught to use 
the powers by which it must achieve success ; that it is 
acquiring information in its proper season and not 
growing up a mental dwarf. Some children can be 
taught earlier than others, but all children may be 
taught better by better efforts and perseverance. 

3. What does the mother owe to the soul of her 
child? The most perfect instruction and the highest 
possible example of piety and morality. The con- 
science of a child, like all its powers, is dependent 
upon the assistance of others before it walks alone. 
Environment shapes very largely the powers and direc- 
tion of the conscience. Right and wrong with the 
child are referred to the supreme tribunal of the 
mother, and what she says, together with what she 



212 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

does, IS tlie standard by which the young conscience 
learns to set itself. The healthy growth of the body, 
the symmetrical development of the mind, sink into 
insignificance compared wdth this necessity of soul- 
growth. Better that you should be the unhappy 
mother of a cripple, better that you should call an 
idiot your child, than that the world should curse the 
day you gave birth to a villain. In its young and 
plastic condition its soul is in your hands. You are 
its teacher and exemplar. Right and wrong are be- 
fore the child. Its natural tendency is certainly not 
towards the good. A mere passive motherhood which 
allows the child to grow up by its own internal prin- 
ciples will find a sad result. The most active efforts 
cannot pull the weeds up as fast as they grow. Max- 
ims and considerations of truth must be constantly 
employed, the tendency and consequences of evil 
constantly displayed. The child must not only hear 
from your lips the principles of religion and morality, 
but must see them as object-lessons in your life. If 
you sit before a child all day teaching him that it is 
wrong to lie, he will rub it all away at one dash if he 
hears you say what he sees is intended to deceive. If 
you urge and enforce upon him as you ought to the 
existence and goodness of God, and the duty of wor- 
shipping and remembering Him, you will produce a 
great effect, you must do so, but not so great as if he 
sees you constantly remembering the same duty and 
living close with God yourself. Teach him the com- 
mandments of God, the common law of humanity, and 
it will be only so much stuff to him if he sees that you 



MOTHERHOOD, 213 

do not care for those things which you tell him so 
seriously are the most important. If he sees you 
worshipping all kinds of idols — money, dress, society, 
adulation, wit — more than you do God ; if he sees you 
kneel down and take God's name in vain by mumbling 
prayers that you do not mean ; if he sees you disre- 
gard every obligation to the sanctity of the Lord's 
day; if he hears you sneer at your parents and sees 
you a bearer of scandals against your neighbor, as well 
as greedy and covetous and discontented, — he will learn 
a thousandfold more from your example than from 
your precepts. He will take at their true value all 
your suggestions and incentives to virtue, — that is, he 
will take them exactly as you yourself use them, only 
as shibboleths. He will grow like you because he sees 
you as you are. With the exception of very rare cases, 
I sincerely believe a mother can make her child a good 
man or a bad man as she wants to. I am almost cer- 
tain she can make him a bad one if she so determines. 
Look forward to the future and contemplate the man 
or the woman whom you now guide as a child. See 
where the ways divide, one going down to infamy and 
sorrow and the other leading up to sunny heights. See 
your child drawing near the forking ways. See him 
stop and think which way he shall go. Your hand 
cannot guide him ; you are seeing him now only in the 
glass of prophecy. Past your influence or counsel, he 
stops to recall the lessons of his life. One by one come 
back your words of caution and warning ; one by one 
appear before him the holy truths, the golden principles, 
the bright example, of a pure life. He stops just one 



214 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

minute to comnuine witli your spirit, and strikes boldly 
forward into the road tliat is so steep and yet so prom- 
ising, — the path that leads ever upward and ends with 
God. Or do you see him perplexed and puzzled, 
glancing down and up wlierc the two ways glide into 
the distance, balance your little instruction against your 
much erroneous example, and slink away down the 
road where the gutter runs, where humanity's sewer 
sweeps along its refuse, where crime abounds, and where 
eternal misery closes the road as in a cul-de-sac ? 

Those ways are ever parting ; they branch at every 
second of the life. Be true to your child now. Exert 
all your energies to arm him for his fight. Determine 
that Vv^ith God's assistance you will train up your child 
to be a blessing to mankind. From Messalinas and 
Agrippinas and the Catherines de Medici spring the 
Neros, Caligulas, and Charles the Ninths, the scourges 
of the earth. From the Hannahs, the Eunices, the Mo- 
nicas, spring the Samuels, the Timothies, the Augus- 
tines, under whom the world grows into happiness and 
hope. In the great flood of immorality, licentiousness, 
and godlessness which is sweeping over society to-day, 
there is no influence to which the better part of men 
look so much as to the mothers of the generation that 
is rising. Laws cannot do any good \ you cannot 
stamp out a cancer in the social world. But in the 
world that is rising now — the young world not yet 
tainted with the corruptions of this one — the influence 
of you mothers is vastly greater than any other. The 
American repul)lic to-day, as it sweeps on towards the 
rocks on which older nations have been wrecked, as it 



MOTHERHOOD, 215 

grows corrupter and richer, has no human hope unless 
it be in the devotion and perseverance of the mothers 
of her sons in inculcating moral and religious truth. 
The republic will be what its men are, and its men will 
be what their mothers make them. As Rome in her 
epoch of extreme danger from the enemy deposed all 
her other guides and trusted everything to her chosen 
dictator, so America to-day passes by senates and 
courts and colleges and puts her trust in the hands of 
the mothers. It is a holy trust, it is a splendid power. 
It is one that you need God's constant help to discharge. 

I have spoken only of the mother's relation to young 
children, because it is upon young children that the 
mother's influence is most felt. As children grow 
older they begin to be touched by other influences, and 
the mother divides her empire with others. 

But at all times, it seems to me, there are two things 
worth remembering, and the first is that there is no 
higher duty on earth than that you owe to your chil- 
dren. If you get that firmly in your mind so that you 
act spontaneously upon it, your duty to them will be 
your chief pleasure. They become the centre of your 
life and your husband's life. Whatever you may do 
outside is an episode; this is life. To make all that is 
possible out of your children, to assist the growth and 
symmetry of their bodies and minds and souls, to work 
upon them more and more with an intenser love than 
ever florist knows who spends his days and nights in 
rearing beautiful flowers, than ever artist knows who 
spends years in touching and retouching cold marble, 
than ever author knows who devotes a lifetime to the 



216 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

child of his brain, is certainly not too much to ask of 
mothers to whom God has given children with the 
possibilities of Gibbon and Raphael and Linnaeus. 

And the second thing worth remembering is that 
you will have an influence with children only as you 
keep young yourself. So long as you have a fresh 
recollection of your own childhood, with its feelings 
and its affections, you will understand the child whom 
you have to rear. Childhood is the same in all the 
ages ; and if you can only take your own childhood as 
you wanted it and dreamed of it and enjoyed it, if 
you can take out of it its troubles and put into it more 
joys and hopes, and give it thus to your little one, you 
will draw him very close to you. But if you imagine 
that children have changed their nature and need dif- 
ferent treatment, if your present wisdom and experi- 
ence make you regret childish pleasures in your own 
youth and seek to take them from your children, you 
are not wise, you are looking for fruit when the time 
for fruit is not yet ; you are supposing children to be 
not children, and will put a barrier between you and 
them forever. She who would teach children must 
have the sympathy of children. Get wisdom, get un- 
derstanding, but keep your child-heart fresh. Be to 
your children all that you used to think that mother- 
hood might be. Call back from the years your early 
fancies which have been forgotten there, go back again 
to the echoes of your own nursery and hear them re- 
peat your own wishes and hopes, and then come from 
the sacredness of that communion with yourself of long 
ago to be to your second little self, your child, a soother 



MOTHERHOOD. 217 

of troubles, a conjurer of joys and surprises, a com- 
panion in instincts and thoughts. 

What grander object can you desire than thus to 
make your child as good and wise and happy as he can 
be ? What is there possibly grander than to have a 
Avhite tablet, a living mind, given to you to work upon 
and fill w^ith thoughts that shall never die? Where are 
the canvases on w^hicli the genius of Zeuxis and Apelles 
painted the glories of the color-world ? Where are the 
beautiful marbles which leaped to life when touched by 
the chisels of Praxiteles and Cleomenes ? Where are 
the palaces reared by the toil of thousands where Zenobia 
covered the desert with Palmyra, and where the wind 
covered Palmyra with the desert ? All gone or linger- 
ing in torsos and ruins. Time has laughed at all that 
men can do to preserve the beauty brought forth by 
the hand of man. But you mothers work upon a sub- 
ject that time cannot touch, upon an imperishable can- 
vas bearing indelible tracery, upon a marble that shall 
survive when Pen tel icon quarries are dissolved with a 
dissolving world, upon a structure that shall be in its 
pristine beauty when stars and suns shall crumble with 
the rust of age. 

The mother who wrought upon the mind of Bacon 
wrought for the eternal ages. You who impress upon 
your child a high and pure truth are working in beauty 
upon an essence which shares the deathlessness of God. 
Happy is the mother who by assiduity, love, and wis- 
dom is able to make her child in all his nature 

*' A thing of beauty and a joy forever, 
That shall never pass into nothingness.'' 
K 19 



SPINSTERS. 

I ADDRESS myself to-night to a class of women who 
have been compelled to endure a vast amount of persi- 
flage in our generation. The spinster, as she was called 
in older English, is simply an unmarried woman, as dis- 
tinguished from others who have entered into the estate 
of matrimony. Pulleyn tells us that " it used to be a 
maxim that a young woman should never be married 
till she had spun herself a set of body, table, and bed 
linen. From this custom all unmarried women were 
termed spinsters, — an appellation they still retain in all 
deed and law proceedings.^^ Taking into consideration 
the different aptitude of women for this spinning art, 
we may easily see that some women will be ready and 
spun into wives earlier than others, and that some will 
be so slow that they will in time gather to themselves 
in their single labors the qualifying adjective of old 
maids. But while marriage is highly honorable among 
all persons, and is so commended of St. Paul, and was 
one of the earliest of God's enactments for mankind, it 
by no means follows that spinsterhood is not also a di- 
vine institution, an estate smiled upon by God and 
contemplated in His wisdom. 

While I write these words my mind turns back over 
the history of the race and the changes of opinion as 
to marriage and celibacy. In our age the married 
218 



SPINSTERS. 219 

woman is reverenced as the highest type of woman's 
nature, and there is a good-natured pleasantry and la- 
ment for those women who fail to reach that acme of 
their growth and remain in maidenhood. But in 
every age and nation before ours, with the exception 
of ancient Judea, the virgin has been the ideal and 
perfect woman. Among the Jewish women the na- 
tional hope and expectation of the birth of the Messiah 
fired the soul of every maiden with the thought that 
she might be the mother of the Great Anointed, and 
the lament of Jephthah's daughter that she should die a 
maiden, of Sarah that she should never be known as a 
mother in Israel, of Elizabeth in her childless age, are 
all expressive of the great splendor with which mar- 
riage was crowned in a nation where any woman might 
through marriage become the mother of the Son of 
God. But in other nations, however pure an idea of 
wifely duties and virtues may have been prevalent, 
there was felt to be a peculiar sanctity and divinity in 
perpetual virginity. Very strangely did the Romans 
express, in their religious ceremonies, their exalted 
view of marriage and also of virginity. The Flamens, 
the highest sacrificial priests, were chosen only from the 
married men, and their marriage was dissoluble only 
by death. On the other hand, the Vestals, who, from 
early twilight of fable, had kept alive the sacred fire 
of the goddess, were held by the severest penalties to a 
perpetual obligation of virginity. In the Eastern na- 
tions the dualistic philosophy which arrayed the senses 
against the soul-powers, and traced all evil to the 
body, naturally raised a fierce ascetic spirit, which en- 



220 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

nobled those who kept under the natural appetites and 
lived in celibate, self-mortification, and spiritual dis- 
cipline. Marriage was tolerated, even recommended 
for weak souls, but only as a necessary evil, against 
which was arrayed the spirit of the age. Men and 
women were esteemed or pitied as they overcame the 
disposition towards married life. For fifteen hundred 
years after Christ this same spirit, breathed from East- 
ern religions through the nobler teachings of the Gos- 
pel self-conquest, put the crown of holiness upon the 
celibate life. Convents sprung up in every valley, 
from the Euphrates to the Tagus, and from the cata- 
racts of the Nile to the islands of the Hebrides. Long 
lines of young women were constantly moving into 
perpetual incarceration, where bolts and bars and ma- 
ceration and discipline might keep them safe from the 
dangers w^hich lurked in society, and which culminated 
in marriage. The wit of St. Jerome set the fashion, 
which obtained for ages, of reverencing the cenobite 
and sneering at the weak wife. All the badinage 
which old maids endure now does not equal that \vhich 
was poured out upon a bride in the early centuries of 
our era. And even to-day the most effective organiza- 
tion which has ever existed among women is that of 
the army of spinsters in the convents and sisterhoods 
of the Church. I said that I believe God intended 
some women should marry and that some should not, 
and that He blesses each estate. This is a demonstra- 
ble truth, if we may rely upon the statistics, which tell 
us that there are more females born every year than 
there are males. Supposing that every man living 



SPINSTERS. 221 

were married, there must be somewhere scattered about 
the world the extra number of women who are not 
mated and must be spinsters, unless the death-rate is 
greater among women than men. These women must 
certainly have been created for that place, and may- 
well begin to inquire what that condition of single life 
was intended by God to effect, why He has so arranged 
matters, and what responsibilities attach to them. As 
a matter of course, so long as human nature is a judge 
of those who shall marry and who shall not, and as 
human nature is influenced more by passions than by 
wisdom, it happens frequently, we may suppose, that 
those who were by nature intended for spinsters find 
themselves wives, and those best adapted for domestic 
duties find themselves spinsters to the day of their 
death. 

Man is not infallible, and has been known to err in 
his opinion as to what nature did intend some women 
for. It is like everything else in which man is the 
agent in executing God's plans. He frequently errs 
and disarranges them. By a multiplicity of such errors 
we have brought a vast amount of confusion and 
trouble into a system which was undoubtedly intended 
to run smoothly and happily. But supposing that God 
intended that there should be in every age a married 
estate and a spinsterhood, and seeing that in our own 
age and all former ages such estates of life have ex- 
isted, and do exist, we may ignore the question as to 
the proper classification of individuals in the two ranks, 
and ask. What is the place which the unmarried woman 
— the old maid if you will — occupies in the divine plan ? 

19^ 



222 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

We have seen what the young girl has assigned to her. 
We have found many normal duties and responsibilities 
for the wife. We have had no difBculty in determin- 
ing God's purpose in motherhood. Each of these 
classes of women has its own functions, which suggest 
themselves. And I do not think it will be difficult to 
find similar functions for the large class of spinsters. 
The thought which strikes us and stimulates us in find- 
ing what their province in life is, is that they are en- 
tirely free from the entanglements and hampering re- 
sponsibilities of the rest of womankind. They form 
a flying squadron which watches the conflict about it, 
and can move in an instant hither or thither as it 
may be needed ; while others are stationary and rooted 
by multiplicity of necessities, they are free to exert 
themselves where they will. Others have routine duties 
to which they are bound. The girl is tied to her school 
and home by many necessities as well as by the diffi- 
dence and inexperience which belong to her age. The 
wife has a primary duty to her husband, and must sac- 
rifice many opportunities for public usefulness to her 
private affairs. The mother has her children, and must 
not leave them however much she may feel her help 
demanded elsewhere. But in society, where rich and 
poor, sick and well, young and old, are all living to- 
gether, it must constantly happen that there will be 
many who must depend upon the help, the instruction, 
the kindness, of others. There is always the ambulance- 
train, groaning on with the army of progress. Where 
is the world to look for efficient help in this great work? 
To those who have no nearer and holier responsibilities. 



SPINSTERS. 223 

The women who have no husbands, no children, no 
family cares, no personal career before them, must feel 
their responsibilities in a wider field. You are not a 
wife to any man and shut up to the smaller horizon of 
his life, but all the love and affection which binds two 
hearts together may be found in the marriage which 
unites your soul with the suffering souls who are about 
you. You find a husband not in the individual, but 
in the species. Mankind, not man, is the object of 
your help and love. You have been deprived of the 
love of children ; fill that void by such kindly efforts 
among the hosts of motherless children that many may 
say of you, " Doubtless she is our mother, though we 
never knew her.^^ See how much you can do : for in- 
stance, in making the world happier by driving out 
ignorance. All about you roars a sea of black, barren 
ignorance. Society has done all it can. It has schools 
and pays for teachers. It has churches and supports 
them. It has lectures and orations and speeches and 
newspapers and books, and yet there are tens of thou- 
sands of children and adults in this city that, from lack 
of opportunity or of ability, make no headway in 
knowledge. They want to teach them some one who 
brings the greater efficiency of the motive of disinter- 
ested benevolence. There are Sunday-schools where 
you are wanted, and where every word you say will be 
a civilizer. Suppose you were to make up your mind 
to find some scholars and to teach them useful lessons. 
You make inquiries, and find that there are hundreds 
willing and waiting to be taught. You have time to 
acquire information and to prepare a pleasant and in- 



224 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

structive lesson for them every Sunday. You have 
time — I mean if you regard this as a divine vocation — 
to visit them through the week, to keep your eye on 
their development and surroundings. You keep this 
up year after year, and is it not true that you will grad- 
ually feel the interest of a sister or a mother in these 
children of your heart? You have a happy, educated, 
and loving cluster of children who will transmit your 
name to their children. Suppose there were ten girls 
or boys in your class ; two days in the week and your 
Sunday hour would be enough to devote to them, and 
you will have the satisfaction of feeling that your life 
is not unfruitful, but that your talents are making 
others ; that you will have some sheaves to bring with 
you when the summer of life is gone and you are 
asked what it has produced. Instead of wrapping up 
your usefulness in a napkin and bringing it in at the 
last just as you received it, no more, no less, with the 
words of the parable, "Thou gavest me one talent, 
here is this that is thine,'^ you may have the record of 
the more faithful servant who entered into the joy of 
his Lord because he had made usfe and profit of every 
talent that he had. It has been my pleasure to know 
some maiden ladies who have done just what I have 
been saying. They have spent years in the city of 
Philadelphia in making educating centres, in establish- 
ing small reading-rooms, free lectures, night-schools, 
Bible-classes, Sunday-schools, until now it is marvellous 
to hear the sum-total of their work. It has spread by 
its own expansive properties. The work which they 
began and nourished has soon felt its own heart-beats 



SPINSTERS, 225 

and thriven by its own life. The growth which in 
coral- formations is called budding is the common pro- 
cess in all such enterprises. The original work throws 
out new centres of life, which gradually detach them- 
selves and become parents themselves. In these small 
clubs — these little ganglia — right thought stimulated 
becomes a powerful social force. It was in such little 
knots and clubs among the Jacobins in Paris that the 
greatest movement in French society originated. It 
is in such small ways of instruction that every refor- 
mation, from that of Sakya-Muni, or Confucius, or 
Jesus, to that of Luther, and Wilberforce, and How- 
ard, and the Anti-Slavery agitators, or the Irish Ke- 
pealers, has been germinated and brought to life. It 
is by associating numbers of yourselves together for 
organized work, or by devoting yourself and your 
talents simply to a smaller field of instruction, that 
you let the world benefit by what you know and have. 
Can you tell in what way you are benefiting the world 
now? If you live quietly, store up knowledge, read 
thoughtfully, exercise your mind, and do not bring 
your mental powers and acquirements into active use 
in extending information, you accomplish only half of 
your destiny. You are all equipped for something, 
and the days go by without your doing that something. 
Your full mind is useful only when it begins to unload 
itself at the ear of those who want w^hat you have. 
The ship needs to lie idle at the wharf until she is 
freighted, but when she has taken her burden she is 
not allowed to rest until she has carried it to the mar- 
kets where it is demanded. The storage of your mind 
P 



22G DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

is worthless until it is brought to those who need it. 
To the work of a teacher, then, you have a divine 
calling by the fact of your freedom from the cares of 
ordinary domestic duties. Absolution from one class 
of responsibilities raises an obligation to others. If 
God has not called you into one room of the great 
workshop, be sure He does not mean you to be work- 
less, but to do that which is to be done in the room where 
He has chosen to put you rather than another. It is the 
greatest mistake in the world to think that you can be 
in any place where there is no demand upon you. And 
if you say you do not know enough to teach, you must 
perceive that you know more than the class of people 
whom you are called upon to teach. But even at the 
worst you can by papers and books and efforts stimu- 
late good thought and assist people to educate them- 
selves, and by work among children you may be a 
great assistance to the public and a great benefactor to 
the private well-being. 

Again, think what you may do and are called on to 
do in removing the hardships and sufferings of society. 
What your sisters of the Sanitary and Christian Com- 
missions did during the w^ar, you are called on to do in 
peace. Among the recollections of that great struggle 
none will be more enduring and noble than that of the 
young women who went to the battle-fields and graced 
the hospital corridors with their ministry of humanity. 
But when the war closed, when the shriek of the shell 
no longer announced the missiles of death, when the 
enginery of w^ar was again retired to its housings, the 
chapter of suffering and death was not finished. The 



SPINSTERS, 227 

Angel of Death yet moves unseen among men. The 
fierce grip of poverty is yet felt upon the vitals of 
many about us. Disease, starvation, misery, — the fun- 
gus-growth of humanity down nearest to the earth, — 
are still calling vociferously for help and relief. On 
this great battle-field, where men are fighting with the 
ancestral enemy whose victorious spear has flashed over 
all our race, there come moans and prayers as direful 
and as earnest as ever struggled through the smoke at 
Bull Run or in the Wilderness. The kindly offices of 
the nurse, of the visitor, of the comforter, are ever in 
demand. 

From that fatal field the long procession of the dying 
and the dead is moving forever. Wherever it stops to 
take up another in its burden, it finds aching hearts 
and bitter sorrow. Where can you do better service to 
yourself, your God, your fellow-men, than in binding 
up the wounds and comforting the hearts of such as 
fall ? Everywhere about you, within half a mile, you 
can find as much sorrow with which to sympathize 
as that which drew the Master's tears for the stricken 
sisters in Bethany. Lazarus was dear to that little 
cottage full of human hearts, and Lazarus was dead. 
Through the generations of men and through each 
individual of those generations shoot-s the same pang 
which Mary and Martha felt. But the kind face and 
hopeful words of the Saviour are not in every house 
now, unless they are represented there by those who 
love and trust Him. Very near you, and yet un- 
known to you, men and women are sitting in dark 
rooms, yet rooms not so dark as their lives. Upon 



228 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

them has fallen the gloomy shadow of the great eclipse, 
— fathers weeping for children because they are not; 
wives dazedly trying to adjust themselves to a new life of 
loneliness and self-support ; children crying for mothers 
whose ears have closed forever to the sounds of earth ; 
friends sitting comfortless and thinking of the loves 
through which the great abyss has yawned. Beth- 
any, not Cana, is the world's representative, and Beth- 
anies are nestled in every corner, waiting and long- 
ing for the coming of the comforter. Why is this 
not your calling and your glory ? Why should you 
not follow the Master in that ministry of consolation, 
treading on the swiftly-moving heels of Death and 
lifting up the bruised hearts ? Who is so able to de- 
vote time to this great, this necessary duty as you, who 
have none of the close and pressing duties of wife and 
mother? My heart rejoices with the hope that our 
Church is more and more seeing the necessity of fur- 
nishing some organization in which you can work effi- 
ciently. From the very earliest days of the Christian 
Church it was apparent that the unmarried women 
were the ones to whom the Church must look for effect- 
ive labors among the sick and the poor. Deaconesses 
were an order before Paul died. Sisterhoods began 
immediately. Bands of faithful women sought out the 
destitute and the dying. For many years membership 
in such orders was voluntary, and there were no vows 
taken by the members. Some labored for a year and 
then withdrew. Some went on from year to year, and 
death found them in the harness. After a while the 
Eastern spirit which sent Anthony to the Egyptian 



SPINSTERS. 229 

desert, and Jerome to preach asceticism and celibacy in 
Europe, put the vow of perpetual virginity over the 
portal of these noble organizations. Convents arose 
with all their glories and all their shame. The Refor- 
mation came. Henry VIII. abolished and confiscated 
all the monastic and conventual property in England. 
The only organizations which made the services of 
w^omen possible fell to pieces. The newly-cleansed 
Church w^ent on without their help, because there was 
no way in which Henry was willing to endow them. 
And for nearly three centuries and a half that great 
Church has failed to provide any general and organ- 
ized work for two-thirds of her children. But now 
the General Convention is turning its attention to the 
subject. There are already sisterhoods of voluntary 
membership with no other promise than that of one 
year of single life. In New York these organizations 
find help from all parts of the country. Young ladies 
from other cities write that they will come for some 
one month in the year and do hospital duty and 
general visitation work. In Philadelphia the Church 
Hospital and other charitable institutions are under 
the constant work and attendance of a similar organi- 
zation. The city is districted and canvassed regularly. 
The wants of the community are made know^n, and as 
far as possible relieved. Every diocese, every city, will 
eventually have such associations, something more than 
the present Women^s Auxiliary Association in this 
city, something less than the sisterhoods of the Roman 
Catholic Church. Until the time comes when there 

are societies where you can find a place to w^ork, you 

20 



230 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

must do the work as best you can alone. But I ask 
you to think how much work you coukl do. Let three 
young ladies who are not dependent upon their labor 
for support^ and who have not any pressing duties, who 
have time to read, and visit, and entertain, and drive, 
and take naps, and make life a holiday, unite in the 
purpose of benevolent work, so many hours in so many 
days. Let them inquire, from those who know, where 
they can begin their efforts. Let them put as much 
energy and affection into the work as into any other 
pleasure or labor, and they will know better at the end 
of two days' work how much there is to be done, and 
how surely it must be done by them or not done at all, 
than they can ever know by hearing it told. There 
is a great truth in the old Latin maxim, Docendo disceSy 
— '^by teaching you learn.'' There would not be less 
truth in one which tells us that by helping others you 
are helped. To see human suffering and to alleviate it, 
to lift a cloud from a sorrowing heart, to find desola- 
tion and plant happiness, to change the ash-heaps 
where Jobs sit in anguish into fertile beds of springing 
hopes and joys, raises one's sense of his own possibili- 
ties in the world and increases his disposition to benev- 
olence as it demonstrates the need and ability to dis- 
charge such benevolence. As the strength comes to 
the muscles that are used, as love is attracted by love, 
as charity becomes ever easier to the charitable, so it is 
true that those who do the most to help others find an 
equal reaction upon their own lives. The more they 
give the more they have. The cruse of oil which 
is all they have, and from which they give the poor 



SPINSTERS. 231 

propliet first, before they feed themselves, is ever emp- 
tying and never empty. 

The little bread which they feared at first would soon 
give out, to their amazement feeds thousands, and at the 
last is more in its fragments than at the first in the loaf. 
It cannot be a hardship that God has left you free to 
take upon you the very highest offices which humanity 
can receive or discharge. It is not to be lamented that 
He has not given you a little family, when He has 
made it possible and easy for you to be everything to 
so many of His ever-present poor. When the elder Pitt 
was gazetted to his peerage, it is told that his second and 
favorite son, William, said he was glad he was not the 
oldest son, whose seat would be among the peers, for he 
wanted to make his fame among the Commons, as his 
great father had. Much in the same spirit, I think, 
many women, fired by a pure philanthropy, ought to 
rejoice that they have not been called to the smaller 
circle of a wife and mother's duties, but are left free to 
enter into the wider and more changing scenes of the 
commons of humanity. 

There you may make a name and fame for yourself. 
There you may feel yourself anointed of God for an 
especial work. In every step you take you may feel 
the ardent conviction that you are moved with a pur- 
pose by the mighty hand of God, — feel it with the same 
mysterious enthusiasm that shook the skies at Clermont 
Mdth the simultaneous Deus vult — "it is God's will" 
— of the thousands who listened to Urban preach the 
war against the Saracen. Your life becomes animate 
with this great purpose. You bear on your heart the 



232 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

destinies of others. You get all the enjoyment from life 
that it can give you. It is only your idle hours that 
you fill up with these occupations. You make enduring 
friendships which are pure and devoid of conventional 
formulas. Many true hearts look to you and call you 
blessed. In the unknown retreats of many souls your 
names are borne before God with the supplications and 
praises of strength which was weakness until you 
touched it, of hope which was despair until you trans- 
muted it, of comfort which was starvation until you 
showed where the manna lay. I do not exaggerate 
what you may do. These are not rhetorical sentences 
or sentimental thoughts. Not a woman who hears me 
say the words is so poor, so useless, so unfit, but that 
she may accomplish such changes and blessings in the 
lives of others that it shall be clearly the finger of 
God. You remember in the old nursery stories how 
the little child sat before the room full of straw which 
she must spin into gold before the morning, and how 
the good fairy came in and by a stroke did the seem- 
ingly impossible thing. How truly does it tell the 
real sad story of life, w^here many are sitting forlornly 
before tasks and sorrows that are too great for them, 
and how sweetly does it emphasize what you may do by 
coming in your strength and by the touches of your 
hand, by the ministry of your heart and purse, ac- 
complishing what is to them almost miraculous, so that 
you leave a household of rich pleasure where you found 
it full of tribulation ! 

Think of what you might do at the hospitals, at the 
charitable institutions, at the jails and station-houses. 



SPINSTERS. 233 

in the poor districts^ in the tenement houses. I know 
it would be unpleasant work, a sacrifice of inclination, 
sometimes a work of danger. But Florence Nightin- 
gale and Miss Lewis, and the Sisters of Catholic and 
Episcopal churches in Memphis, and the heroines of 
the war, did not sit down to ease because there was 
danger and hardship staring them in the face. 

No success, no benevolence, is achieved without such 
an abandonment of the dolcefar niente life. And if a 
considerable number of young and unmarried ladies 
could form a society for general and persistent work 
among the poor and sick, and should put as much vigor 
and energy into it as is now manifested in learning the 
Kensington stitch, or porcelain-painting, or wood-carv- 
ing, or the German, I cannot but think they would ac- 
complish vast results and laudable ones. All the world 
is open to you. Society demands your help. Spinster- 
hood is an enduring order, whose ranks are replenished 
as they are thinned. God, who has ordained that we 
shall have the poor always with us, has not left them 
without a reasonable claim upon society. The great 
mass of people have duties assigned them by their Cre- 
ator, and so turn naturally to the able and unemployed 
members of society as a repair and sanitary corps. Of 
course, I know that every one has duties. You can 
fill every hour of the day with something, but it may 
not be the thing you were intended to do or that you 
are any better for doing. 

When St. Paul was called to preach the Gospel it 
was utterly repugnant to him, but he lifted up his blind 
eyes and manfully asked the question, " Lord, what 

20* 



234 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

wilt thou have me to do f^ And when he found out 
what it was, he did it with all his strength. I urge 
you all who have no binding duties to husband or 
children, to try and find out what your calling is and 
engage in it, whether it carries you on stormy seas or 
leads you to the retired spots of a less dangerous career. 
But be sure that God intends you to do something in 
the world besides eating and drinking and dressing 
and reading. Those are your privileges; something 
better than these is your vocation. The reproach of 
an old maid is not that she has failed to find a husband, 
but that she has failed to find a place in God's work- 
shop. 

A husband is not always necessary, and if he were 
he would be in many cases a necessary evil ; but an 
occupation, a duty to the world outside of yourself, is 
necessary to kill selfishness, to develop womanhood, to 
keep you abreast of the current of human thoughts and 
needs and sympathies. And in the perfectness of our 
nature, in the final touch of our souls with God, you 
shall know what the Saviour meant when He said that 
love to the humble is love to Him, and inasmuch as 
you do kindness to them you do it to Him. 



THE BREAD-WINNER. 

Some time ago I stood in a crowd about the window 
of the registry department at the post-office^ waiting 
for my turn. As the young ladies who are the efficient 
clerks in that office were moving about within^ I heard 
a bass grumbling behind me, and, turning around, saw 
a rough, uncombed, seedy-looking man from the back- 
woods, who was in a high state of indignation that the 
young ladies should be employed there. " There are 
not enough men in the country, I suppose. All too 
busy, are they? Got to hire women,^^ he muttered. 
Looking from him to them, from his heaviness to their 
quickness, from his stupid face to their alertness and 
rapid flashes of perception, I could not feel that the 
government had made any mistake in passing such men 
by and choosing such women. And yet the thought 
uppermost in that man^s mind would strike nine men 
out of ten as reasonable, so strong is custom and so 
weak are men. That women should enter the fields 
of labor and take the places that only men have occu- 
pied heretofore, that they should be allowed to compete 
with men and multiply the supply of labor by two 
while the demand remains stationary, seems a hardship 
and a grievance to men who have been accustomed to 
see women leave such matters alone. It is only in the 

last thirty years that women have been allowed to sup- 

235 



236 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

port themselves. Before that time they did work wliich 
has been theirs from the beginning of the race. They 
earned money by sewing because men could not. They 
supported themselves by knitting because men left it to 
them. They taught in schools and gave a life of labor 
for the simple bread and butter which fed them. In 
all retired and unseen ways they earned a few dollars 
and managed to get a living from the society of which 
they were the most law-abiding and quiet members. 
But they were not employed in public offices. They 
were not thought of as clerks in stores or hands in fac- 
tories. A girl who answered an advertisement for an 
entry-clerk in a dry-goods store would have been 
thought as much out of her mind then as one would 
now who applied for a street-car drivership. There 
was a sense of woman^s unfitness for almost every kind 
of employment^ because almost every kind of employ- 
ment had been refused to her before. If a woman had 
no husband or father or brother or son to support her, 
and couldn't support herself by making shirts at a 
dollar a dozen, or teaching school at a dollar a day, she 
must not be too proud to accept the alms and charity 
of society, even if she could excel half the men in 
their own trades and professions. 

We are indebted to the necessities of the war for a 
great many reformations, and not the least of them is 
the change in the possibilities of a woman's life. 
When the great part of the men of the country be- 
tween eighteen and forty-five were taken away from 
the usual occupations of society and sent to the front 
to create an additional demand upon the labors of the 



THE BREAD-WINNER. 237 

country, it was necessary to find somewhere substitutes 
for them at home in offices and mills and stores. Ma- 
chinery was improved, so that some of the extra de- 
mand was met, but there never was, and never will be, 
any machine invented to take the place of the living 
brain, and so everywhere the women were called on 
and stepped into the vacant places. When the war 
closed and the men came back, it was impossible to 
deny that women had developed very remarkable apti- 
tudes for some branches of business, and were worth 
more than the men themselves. Employers had to con- 
sider the new labor element which had been so profit- 
able, and yet had to consider the old which was clam- 
oring for work. The solution of the difficulty was 
the most natural one. They retained the best parts of 
each, and men and women settled down to an unequal 
sharing of the loaves and fishes of society. I say un- 
equal, because female labor had not so firmly seated it- 
self that it could aiford to dictate wages, and was glad 
to keep its place even at lower rates of compensation. 
Capital could not blind its eyes to the plain fact that 
there were important duties for which the finer and 
more delicate powers of a woman were better adapted 
than the stronger and clumsier powers of a man, and 
yet could not make up its mind to pay the same wages 
for the greater skill. Women were taken into the 
government employ, for instance, and paid about one- 
half the regular salary of their desk. 

Any one may go to the Treasury Department in 
Washington and see the clerks in the Redemption Bu- 
reau counting the worn-out money returned for cancel- 



238 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

lation. Men and women are employed. The work is 
the same to all. Nothing can be more amazing than 
the rapidity — unless it be the accuracy — with which the 
fingers of these women tell off the great heaps of bills. 
They are eminently fitted for the work by God who 
made them. And yet the men are paid one-half more 
salary, and in some cases twice as much salary, for the 
same work, which they cannot do any better, and per- 
haps not so well. It is the same in all branches of 
business where women are employed. 

Their labor is compensated, not in proportion to its 
profit, but in the projiortion which a woman's capacity 
is supposed to bear to that of man. The way em- 
ployers arrive at the amount female labor is worth is 
not by estimating the value of its productions, the 
amount of gain which the woman has made, and pay- 
ing a commission or percentage upon that amount, but 
it is too often fixed by taking a man's wages as the 
standard and deducting graduated amounts from that 
sum. This is shown by a case within my knowledge, 
where a young girl employed at four dollars per week 
ventured to ask for an increase in her wages. The an- 
swer was, ^^ We can get a man for six dollars." But 
if the man can't do the work any better than the girl, 
and if the work earns enough to pay the man six dol- 
lars, why does it not earn enough to pay the girl the 
same ? What is the distinction based on ? Because 
a man has more brute strength, it does not follow that 
he is worth more to sell ribbons. Because he can bear 
more physical labor, it does not follow that he is worth 
more as a judge of lace or a matcher of colors. When a 



THE BREAD-WINNER. 239 

man and a woman apply at the same time for a position 
to break stone or do a porter's work, there is no diffi- 
culty in seeing that the man is worth far more than 
the woman, as a rule, for this kind of business. He 
has the natural qualification of strong muscles and 
powerful limbs, which she lacks, and she must be con- 
tent to step back and see him paid for this kind of 
work, because he is worth the money and she is not. 
But let the same two persons apply at the folding coun- 
ter of a press-room or a book-bindery, where the de- 
mand is not so much for strength as for quickness and 
skill, and the woman may do more in an hour than the 
man can possibly do, and consequently the woman can 
earn more for her employer than the man possibly can. 
Now, that in such a case as this the man, earning less, 
should be waged more because he is a man, and the 
woman, earning more, should be waged less because she 
is a woman, violates all sense of justice and right. The 
standard of wages should be a fixed one, and fixed by 
the productive power, not by the sex or color or height, 
of the worker. Here is the real strength of that move- 
ment which, under the name of the " Woman's Suffrage 
Association," seeks to improve the condition of women. 
The only hold they have upon the popular sentiment is 
in this popular consciousness that they are wronged in 
the matter of their labor. The people of this country 
are not in favor of extending the right of suffrage to 
women, simply because the women themselves do not 
desire it, and because it in no way commends itself to 
them as a reform. 

Aside from the few who agitate the question and are 



240 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

the leaders in tlie movement, there is no general indi- 
cation on the part of the great mass of women that 
they want to vote, or would vote if they could. Where 
tlie privilege has been offered them, as in the school 
elections in Massachusetts, they have in effect declined 
to use it, so small and insignificant was the number 
who registered in accordance with the law. And if 
we are told that in the days of slavery there was no 
general clamor for |*reedom on the part of the slaves 
themselves, and that they had to be taught the miseries 
of their condition and emancipated by the reforming 
efforts of others, — that women, like them, have to be 
stirred up to an appreciation of their ^ATongs, and ac- 
tually have the ballot thrust upon them, because they 
will not see what is for their good, — I think the answer 
must be that we decline to consider the nineteen mil- 
lions of American women upon the same plane of in- 
telligence and will as the four millions of slaves, who 
had forgotten or never known what liberty meant and 
how much their misery was the result of their wrongs. 
It is as clear as the day that the opposition to woman's 
suffrage to-day is not on the part of men, but of women 
themselves. There is a general conviction, growing 
from the diffused knowledge of women's sentiments, 
that as a class women do not desire the ballot, and 
would not use it. When the women of the country, or 
any considerable number of them, request this right, it 
will not be denied them. But it will not be considered 
as a desirable reform to give a general privilege which 
will be exercised by an inappreciably small number of 
the privileged class, and thus become another element 



THE BREAD-WINNER, 241 

of corruption in popular elections. Astute politicians 
would soon find the value of the purchasable votes 
among the lower classes of women, while no impor- 
tunity would elicit the suffrage of the better and more 
moral class. 

But when this association urges the necessity of re- 
forming the present condition of woman as to her 
rights of equal compensation for equal labor, it touches 
a sympathetic chord in the popular heart. There they 
have an undoubted mission, and a noble one. It ap- 
peals to the best sentiments of our nature. Not only 
gallantry, but honor and justice, come to their assist- 
ance and raise their voices together for a change. The 
woman who has to support herself and a family should 
have all the opportunities of labor opened to her, and 
be permitted to compete with other laborers in every 
industry, claiming no more and receiving no less than 
others ; so that if she be rejected it is not because she is 
a wctman, but because she is not able for the duty, and 
if she succeed she is paid not by courtesy to a woman, 
but by right to an earner. 

In the cotton-fields of the South, as well as in the 
vineyards of Europe and the hop-yards of New York, 
the nimble fingers of the women far outstrip the efforts 
of the men who work beside them. To such labor 
they are especially adapted. How far the reform shall 
go, to what places they shall be admitted, to what 
professions they are called, it is impossible as yet to 
say. But there does not appear to be any in which 
women may not excel and have not already excelled. 
When we look about the world into all the means of 
-L q 21 



242 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

earning bread, and ask, " Where shall the limit be 
placed beyond which a woman shall not go ?'' we can- 
not place it as the old Jewish temple defined the court 
of the Gentiles, into which all women might go, and 
beyond which none should pass. The natural qualifi- 
cations of women differ as do those of men, and some 
succeed in positions where all before them failed. It is 
a fact that has often been dwelt upon that women lack 
the inventive faculty. They depend almost altogether 
upon men to improve the tools with which they work. 
Spinning-wheels and sewing-machines and pianos, which 
are used by ten women where they are used by one man, 
are nevertheless the products of man's invention, not 
Avoman's. In professional work this counts very 
largely, and associates itself with the habit of analysis 
and reflection as the factor of success. It cannot be 
denied that in the main elements of aptitude for the 
duties of the three great professions the masculine 
mind is superior to the feminine. Perhaps it is. only 
the superiority of experience. But is it not true that 
in the female mind generally there is an absence of 
that inquiring faculty which seeks to know the causes 
of things and the explanation of well-known phenom- 
ena ? It is that faculty which impels the professional 
mind. The physician, who understands well enough 
that certain drugs produce certain effects, wants to 
know much more than that if he can. He wants to 
know why they do so, and whether there be not some 
better way. His professional spirit is that of the clue- 
hunter, who goes back from cause to cause, staying at 
none, and his quest leads him at last to the first cause, 



THE BREAD-WINNER, 243 

toward which every other inquiry leads. It is the 
scientific spirit which inspires him^ which inspires the 
lawyer to find principles on which laws rest as a sys- 
tem, which inspires the clergyman to find the causes of 
human and divine action in the universe; and in that 
analytic and scientific spirit woman has not yet shown 
great development. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, in the 
*^ Intellectual Life/^ speaking on this subject, gives an 
instance of the lack of this faculty in women : " Many 
years ago I happened to be in a room filled with Eng- 
lish ladies, most of whom were highly intelligent, and 
the conversation turned upon a sailing-boat which be- 
longed to me. One of the ladies observed that sails 
w^ere not of much use, since they could only be avail- 
able to push the boat in the direction of the wind, — a 
statement which all the rest received w^ith approbation. 
Now, all these ladies had seen ships working under 
canvas against head- winds, and they might have re- 
flected that without that portion of the art of sea- 
manship every vessel unprovided with steam would 
assuredly drift upon a lee-shore, but it was not in fem- 
inine nature to make a scientific observation of that 
kind. And this absence of curiosity in women ex- 
tends to things they use every day. They never want 
to know the insides of things as w^e do. All ladies know 
that steam makes a locomotive go, but they rest satisfied 
with that, and do not inquire further how the steam sets 
the wheels in motion. They know it is necessary to 
wind up their watches, but they do not care to inquire 
into the real effects of that little exercise of force.^^ 
If this be merely the consequence of lack of oppor- 



244 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

tunity to develop such qualities in the retired sphere in 
which they have heretofore lived, it is no argument 
against their fitness for professional life ; but if it be 
the result of constitutional causes which cannot be 
avoided by any degree of opportunity, then it is fatal 
to their case. Of course there are many men in pro- 
fessions who have not the analytic spirit of which I 
speak, but they only emphasize the truth of the propo- 
sition, because they are the ones who fail and hang 
on to their rapidly-moving profession by the hem of 
the garment, and are often left behind rolling in the 
dust. 

But the only way to solve the question of woman's 
fitness for professional life is not by a priori arguments 
for or against it, but by experience; and for that reason 
I believe they should have the largest opportunities to 
try. When Dr. Johnson was told of some woman 
preaching in the Methodist revival of his day, he said 
he should feel the same astonishment in hearing her 
that he felt in seeing a dog walking on its hind-legs. 
The wonder was not that she should do it well, but 
that she could do it at all. But Dr. Johnson must 
have known that there has not been an age in the his- 
tory of the Church w^here women have not exhorted as 
they did in his day. The Spirit chooses its own instru- 
ment and blesses its operations. 

Whether the Church should ordain women to preach 
as a regular order is another question, on which we have 
no light as yet to make us reverse the historic teacliings 
of the race. But that we should provide some way to 
control and use the great religious powers of woman's 



TEE BREAD-WINNER. 245 

soul in impressing others is certainly true. Macaulay 
has well shown how the Roman Church makes power- 
ful allies of the St. Ursulas and St. Theresas, while the 
Protestant Churches drive into antagonism and schism 
the Joanna Southcotes and the Countesses of Hunting- 
ton and the Mrs. Frys. There is much to learn yet in 
the methods by which God would reach sinners. 

But, aside from professional life, in which the ranks 
are already crowded, and in which woman's success as 
a bread-mnner may be considered doubtful, what other 
means of support present themselves ? I do not know 
any from which she may be thought excluded, except 
those where the necessities of physical strength practi- 
cally shut her out. No one knows better than I do 
how hard it is to find a position even for a bright and 
capable girl, but there is no position to which she may 
not aspire, and none which she can possibly attain where 
she need feel any sense of transgression upon an alien 
domain. In the great world-wide necessity of earning 
bread for hungry mouths there can be no divine dis- 
crimination against a half of all who hunger and thirst, 
and there can be no divine injunction against a woman's 
entering into any honest avenue that leads to a comfort- 
able means of independent support. It is an amazing 
thing that there is a feeling of repugnance on the part 
of the native American woman to enter into domestic 
service. 

The demand for trained house-servants is very great, 
the wages good, and the support certain. In fact, the 
real capitalists of the country are the servant-girls. 
All they earn is clear profit. The expense of clothes is 

21^ 



246 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

not greater than tlie usual perquisites whicli a faithful 
and lionest girl will receive in a good family. 

The wages may not seem much, but a cook who gets 
three dollars and a half a week and her board is about 
as w^ellpaidasany girl in any ordinary labor, — in truth, 
better. Suppose a girl enters a mercantile house. She 
gives all her time during the day, takes care of herself, 
goes through the street at unpleasant hours, and gets 
from four dollars to eight dollars per week, much oftener 
the former than the latter. And yet thousands of girls 
who must support themselves will not think of house- 
service. It is considered an insult to recommend a girl 
to apply for the position of nurse, or house-girl, or cook. 
It is not so in the, great mass of people in England, or 
France, or Germany. There is not any opprobrium at- 
taching to such service there. They are not dependent 
upon the service of foreigners, and in constant appre- 
hension of a revolt by the Swiss guards whom they hire 
to help them. Young girls in England who must sup- 
port themselves do not hesitate to seek positions in the 
great houses, where with fidelity and capacity manifested 
on their part they have a lifetime home and comfort. 
But in our country these places are left to the Irish, 
and Welsh, and German, and Swedish, and colored 
people. American servants are few and growing fewer. 
Girls crowd into factories, where the work is wearing 
and protracted, where they stand all day and go home 
so tired that they fall asleep at once, where they have 
no opportunity for social or intellectual improvement, 
and where from scanty wages they must board and 
dress themselves. 



THE BREAD-WINNER. 247 

They crowd behind counters, where they feel all the 
stuigs of a dependent position, and where they are sub- 
jected to the petty tyranny of every little soul who 
may have ten cents to enter the store with, and at the 
week's end they have a very small roll of bills out of 
which must come all the expenses of seven days' living. 
Here, too, they are shut out from most of the means of 
improving their minds and bodies. Or they rush be- 
fore school-boards and apply for positions of teachers 
in the schools, where they must be content with eight 
dollars a week for labor the most wearisome and con- 
fining. It is true their salaries increase with their 
experience, until they may get six and eight hundred 
dollars a year ; but these salaries are for the few and 
only after years of service, and from them must be 
taken the means of finding a home and living. I am 
not saying that these places should not be sought. A 
teacher is a benefactor of society, one of the most valu- 
able agents in improving the world. Any woman may 
well make teaching her object. So of clerkships and 
factory places. By all means let the girls apply for 
such places if they can fill them and support themselves 
by them. 

But what I wonder at is that there is such a false 
shame about entering domestic service, such a complete 
abandonment of that whole field to a class of people 
who could not compete against the American girls if 
they sought the places. Girls who have done the 
housework at home year after year, understand it 
thoroughly, are neat and quick in doing it, never 
think, when the narrow times come and they must 



248 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

support themselves, that they have learned a trade 
which will support them, and where they will be in 
constant demand. And why? Simply because they 
think it beneath them ; because they have been ac- 
customed to see such places filled by ignorant people 
or by those who are socially beneath them. To be 
called a servant, to run at the pull of a bell, to have a 
mistress to obey, — this is revolting. But where on the 
earth can you get a place where you will not be a ser- 
vant to somebody, where you will -not be compelled to 
obey, and where you will not at times be made to feel 
insignificant? There is no shame in honest labor. 
There is no phase of domestic life where you may not, 
by retaining your own self-respect, secure that of every- 
body else ; and there is no kind of occupation where 
you may come so near to the love and regard of those 
who employed you at first for money, and at last would 
take no amount of money to let you go. I have seen 
women in Europe harnessed to a plough beside a horse 
or ox, and felt that human nature had sunk too low, — 
that there ought to be something more than a plough- 
chain between man and beast ; and yet there was the 
most perfect contentment in those w^omen, an utter 
absence of shame, because shame is the sensation which 
follows a moral wrong or a degradation, and there can 
be no degradation in necessary duty. I know many 
people will reply with the personal argument and sneer 
at this sentiment, asking if I should like my sisters or 
my mother to become cooks and house-girls, and whether 
I should be willing to act as a valet or butler in case 
of necessity. Of course I shall be happy if the women 



THE BREAD-WINNER. 249 

of my family are kept free from the necessity of self- 
support ; but if they must at last come to the decision 
as to a labor, I will say in all earnestness that I should 
rather see them servants in some respectable family than 
see them enter factories or stores. And, as for myself, 
if the time comes when my mind cannot support my 
body, and I am left to the ordinary physical trades, I 
should, without shame or pride, accept the position 
of valet or butler, and try to fill the place to the best 
of my ability. I might find the place beyond my 
capacities^ for w^e all have a supercilious feeling about 
positions which we consider beneath us and imagine 
they are easily filled, whereas there is a peculiar gift 
required to fill any position perfectly. Many a good 
emperor might make no better servant than Handy 
Andy, and many a fine lady might have difficulty in 
dusting a parlor well or waiting on a table. 

In answer, then, to the constant inquiry on the part 
of American women how they can support themselves, 
every available place being taken, I say that the great 
demand in America to-day is for skilled servants, for 
economical and sagacious and trained domestic labor. 

A few days since I had a letter imploring help. A 
young lady had tried every possible way to get work. 
She wanted anything that w^ould give her bread. She 
was educated and wrote well. Now, what could I do 
for her? What place could I get her that would sup- 
port her ? I could go to a store and ask for a clerk- 
ship for her, but I had already done that for a score 
just as competent. I could try all the places which 
she could suggest, but I had already run up and down 



250 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

tliat gamut so frequently that I knew just the tone 
Avliicli each key woukl give out. That evening I had 
a good laugh at the story tokl by a friend of the awk- 
^var(lness of a new servant. She had just come from 
Ireland, and had nearly suffocated the family by blow- 
ing out the gas at night, and had perpetrated various mis- 
takes of the same kind. And yet that girl had been 
picked up by the fierce demand for house-servants and 
dropped down, as soon as she touched American soil, 
into a support and wages. This young lady, who was 
about to starve or beg, could have done this servant's 
duties, probably successfully, and perhaps so success- 
fully as to find an abiding, happy, comfortable home. 
All she needed to do was to go and apply for the place. 
But would she have thanked me to recommend it to 
her? She did not, for that was what I did recom- 
mend, and I have heard nothing more from her, and 
probably have forfeited her esteem. 

You say it is hard for a young girl brought up to 
be waited on to become herself a servant to others. 
Undoubtedly it is, but it is harder to have nothing to 
eat, and it ought to be harder to beg. I am speaking 
now of necessity. I am urging a great, needy class of 
unemployed women to turn their attention to a great 
and ever-growing demand which only women can fill, 
and, by meeting this demand, benefit society as w^ell as 
themselves. The same pride which sends so many 
young men into professions when they ought to be on 
the cobbler's bench or turning a lathe, or, better yet, 
turning the soil, prevents our girls from doing w^hat is 
called menial labor. They are pleased to have it 



THE BREAD-WINNER. 251 

known that in their father^s house they have learned 
to be excellent cooks^ to bake bread, to make many- 
little side-dishes, and to do all the little duties about 
the house. There is no disgrace in being, as it were, 
an amateur in the art, but the disgrace is felt when the 
art begins to support them, when it becomes a profes- 
sion. Congreve, who had earned his reputation and 
wealth and station in society by literary work, became 
ashamed of his literary work in later years, and affected 
the tone of the gentleman who had amused himself in 
odd moments by writing the '' Mourning Bride^^ and 
" Love for Love.^^ How contemptible such affectation 
seems! How contemptible any affectation is which 
makes one despise honest work by which bread has 
been secured, or shrink from honest work by which it 
may be secured ! The humblest duties of menial ser- 
vices have been discharged with fidelity and pleasure 
by men whose names are among the immortal few in 
letters and art and eloquence. Sixtus V. ruled the 
papal world, but once he had ruled a herd of swine; 
Samuel Johnson had been a sizar at Oxford ; Gold- 
smith went through all the forms of a servant^s duties; 
Richard Hooker never did get far away from the duties 
of a nurse; and the world doesn^t remember them with 
regret that they demeaned themselves, but with pride 
that they were so manly as to accept any position by 
which they might live and climb. And it will be a 
happy day for America when we free ourselves from 
the great error that it is ignoble to earn a living by the 
use of the muscles and hands and feet, and aristocratic 
to live by the wits and profession. We must get back, 



252 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

if not to the days when " Adam delved and Eve span/^ 
at least to the spirit of honest industry by which the 
rocks of New England were covered with corn and 
wheat by the labors of our forefathers, and the tidy 
homes and skilful housewifery and domestic labors of 
our grandmothers became proverbial throughout the 
earth. 



FALLEN WOMEN. 

Some of the most affecting stories that have ever 
been told are told in the Bible about sinful women. 
Very strange is the place which woman's sin holds in 
the unfolding scheme of divine revelation, I do not 
speak now of the early transgression of Eve, but of 
the sins of her daughters, even to the death of Christ. 
It cannot be without some purpose that the Scriptures, 
in recording the genealogy of Jesus Christ, go outside 
the line of male descent but five times in all the pre- 
ceding generations. The only women through whom 
the Saviour's lineage is traced are the Virgin Mary, 
Bathsheba, Ruth, Rahab, and Thamar, and two of 
these were the purest and three the most sinful of their 
sex. The long line of mothers stretching back from 
Mary for a thousand years is ignored by the evangelist 
until his pen stops at the name of her ^' who had been 
wife to Uriah the Hittite.'' Again going back in the 
never-failing parentage, mentioning Ruth only, he 
sweeps over five hundred years and finds a fourth 
mother to the pure One in the harlot Rahab, whose 
name had been a by-word in Jericho. Again the line 
is dropped. Many mothers are forgotten until we read 
of Thamar and her crime with Judah. So we find that 
God's Holy Spirit, dictating to the sacred writer how to 
record the human origin of our Lord, traced that origin 

22 253 



254 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

through the seed of woman only by long intervals of 
dsecent, and out of five mothers gave Him three who 
were greater sinners than all others. Why this is so, 
why Rebecca and Sarah and Leah were not mentioned 
by St. Matthew, why any female ancestors should have 
been mentioned, and these five rather than others, is 
strange and suggestive. Then again, in the Gospel, the 
woman who was a sinner occupies a very conspicuous 
and pathetic place. What is there in literature which 
touches our sympathies more effectually than the little 
incident which St. John tells us in his eighth chapter, 
where the guilty woman stands alone with the Master 
and He is drawing His fingers through the dust upon 
the floor ? What a position among the early disciples 
of the Lord is that held by Magdalen ! To whom else 
did the Saviour promise that the memory of her simple 
act of love, done in a little room in Judea, should share 
the immortality of the sacred gospel itself, except to 
the woman who was a sinner and yet anointed Him as 
her Saviour? The pages of the testament of Christ^s 
dying love are full of the same stories of His forgiving 
pity, of His encouraging w^ords, of His ardent solici- 
tude, of His divine affection for the fallen daughters 
of the race of Bathsheba and Rahab and Thamar. 
The Pharisees of His day, — eternal types of men from 
whom form has passed out of the soul, who measure 
God^s advancing plans by the foot-rule and His love 
by the pint-cup, who cry aloud in the public streets 
that the customs of Moses are in danger because men 
are healed upon a holy day or in an unusual way, 
who are suspicious of men differing from themselves 



FALLEN WOMEN, 255 

and publicly denounce the man who, in his efforts to do 
good in the way in which God urges his energies into 
action, does not commend himself to them, and conse- 
quently is a heathen and a man not of God, — the Phari- 
sees clamored that Jesus received sinners and ate with 
them ; that He could not be a prophet, or He must 
know that the woman He had encouraged was a fallen 
creature, from whom He should have turned away in 
contempt. But His answer expresses the real senti- 
ment of the human heart at its best : ^^ The sick, not 
the whole, need the physician/' The gospel which 
was to regenerate the world was not to be stored up 
and kept for great emergencies ; it was not to dress it- 
self in the robe of respectability and shrink from the 
touch of the vile and low ; it was not to be a proud, 
aristocratic society, — free, indeed, from sensual sins, but 
full of the callousness and meanness and narrow bigotry 
of the elder son in the parable. But I know it is un- 
just to reason from what was proper twenty centuries 
ago in Palestine to what is proper now in America. I 
am aware that lapses of time and changes of customs 
and moral habits raise different duties and obligations. 
But still it has always seemed to me that if Jesus 
Christ were to again come and labor as He did once 
among mortals, He would not stand aloof from the 
world of sinners as His people do and as His Church 
does. I do not think He would be found in the com- 
pany of those of us who merely denounce the sin and 
keep away from the sinner. In His sinlessness and 
purity He could do much from which mortal sinners 
must shrink and He could speak as no man can, but 



256 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

can it be possible that He expected His Church to per- 
petuate itself through the ages of human lusts without 
bringing itself in some way in relation with the class 
of Magclalens who most need its help and most shrink 
from its temples ? In what way docs the Church to- 
day reach the persons whom it was organized to reach, 
the sinners whom Jesus came to seek and to save? In 
what way does it eiFectually benefit that great number 
of people who are out on the streets to-night, and as 
far from the gospel influence as if they walked the 
streets of some other planet ? 

You say the fault is with the people, to whom the 
church doors are open, and who turn away from them 
with contempt. Suppose it to be so, what do you say 
more than was presumed, — that they are sinners ? The 
same thing was unquestionably true when Jesus came. 
The synagogues w^ere open, and the streets were full of 
people who would not go and reform themselves. But 
Christ, so soon as He had gathered a handful of dis- 
ciples from the synagogues, sent them out into the by- 
ways and dark ways where the people w^ere who never 
saw the inside of the synagogue. Where the danger 
of infection was greatest ; where the inventive genius 
of evil had made sin most powerful and alluring ; where 
human nature was most depraved and abandoned to the 
devil, — there was where Jesus sent His followers to 
work. What would have been the history of the Chris- 
tian Church if Jesus had gathered His disciples to- 
gether in an esoteric club and striven to make them holy 
and pure by seclusion from the world, by keeping them 
from contact from the evil which was in the world, by 



FALLEN WOMEN. 257 

insulating them from the current of social life, so that 
they should never be rudely shocked by the sound of 
blasphemy, by the sight of licentiousness, by the knowl- 
edge of sin in man ? Those disciples might have be- 
come saints and died saints whose memory would have 
been fragrant to our day, but the world would have had 
no more enduring benefit from them than it had from 
Simeon Stylites or Pachomius. Instead of such hot- 
house treatment, such an economy as would have forced 
them into individual spirituality and left all the outer 
world in ignorance of the warmth and power of soul 
development, our Saviour taught His disciples to grow 
strong by contest, to grow pure by seeing and hating 
and removing impurity, to test their own growth in 
grace by their energy in communicating grace to those 
who most needed it. The first cry of the Saviour was 
for men to ^' Come,'^ the second for them to " Go" 
into all the world and carry the good news and the for- 
giveness and the strength which He had given them. 
The Church which Jesus contemplated^was certainly 
not one vast fabric, but an earth-covering net of little 
and self-existing bodies, — all united in one holy purpose 
and hope, it is true, but, after all, having the individual 
as the cell-principle. Each member of the Church was 
to grow by his own life spiritually given him, and to 
throw out new life centres from himself, so that the 
catholic, universal body should be everywhere and at 
all times throbbing with its creative and expanding 
vitality, each individual member acting upon the dead 
spiritual natures about him and communicating his 
life and purpose to them. 



258 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

I would say nothing that for a moment obliterates or 
obscures the dreadful nature of the sin and danger of 
these fallen women. Wrecked and wretched, they make 
the wrecks and wretches of society. From the days of 
the Thamars and the Rahabs they have been the lepers 
and infecters of humanity. Every other form of evil 
influence has been somewhat affected by the changing 
phases of moral sentiment and by the operation of 
repressing laws, but the steady, unalterable current of 
this form of sin has set steadily through every nation 
and through every age. What Cincinnati is, that every 
great city has been. Pompeii, uncovered after its long 
burial, displays with equal pomp its glories and its 
shames. Wherever humanity has been strong enough 
to rear mighty cities and splendid monuments, it has 
been weak enough to impress indelibly upon them the 
defacements of its sins and crimes. Accepting, then, the 
truth that there is an ineradicable sin about us, the 
solemn question which we as children of God ought to 
consider is not the guilt of these women, but their 
misery and our obligation to them. When the Saviour 
spoke to the crowd of accusing Pharisees in the temple 
and bade any on-e who was sinless to stone the fallen 
woman, it certainly did not mean sinless in the way in 
which she was a sinner, but He made those men see 
themselves from the view-point of God, where degrees 
of sin fade away before the universal fact of sin, and 
the conscience of every one was troubled by the inspec- 
tion of his own life. When those men next saw that 
woman I am sure they remembered that lesson, and 
while they may have detested the sin as much as ever, 



FALLEN WOMEN. 259 

yet for the sinner they must have had a kindlier and 
humaner — humaner because diviner — pity and aiFection, 
as one who shared with each of them the strange heri- 
tage and curse of mortal sin, and though she ow^ed ten 
thousand pounds and they but one hundred pence apiece, 
yet all alike were bankrupts at the registry of heaven. 

You will bearwuthme — for it is good for us to think 
of these things sometimes — while I try to arouse your 
compassion and sympathy for these fallen sisters. God 
knows how much obloquy they endure and how seldom 
there is an appearing Christ to cheer them and help 
them to a better life. 

1. Do you know that in all the kindly sentiments of 
our nature, in all the aifectionate emotions w^hich under- 
lie a religious life, this class of women is especially rich 
and noble? They have natures in which the gospel 
seed, when once it has been absorbed, takes the firmest 
hold and growls the richest fruit. 

The woman w^ho was the last at the cross and the first 
at the sepulchre was one of them. She loved as she 
had been forgiven, — much. This ought to be remem- 
bered when men shake the head at any effort to reform 
them, and tell us that they are hardened, and aban- 
doned, and dead to everything that is pure and spirit- 
ual and of good report. They do not manifest any 
such deadness in charity and benevolence and affection, 
which are living graces wherever they are showm. And 
do not let us for a moment doubt that in the w^hirl and 
sweep and glare of their short lives there are many of 
them w^ho in their remorse and horror would give every- 
thing to escape from such a life. Human nature 



260 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

assumes strange sliapes, it puts on many masks, but it 
never loses entirely the instincts and sensibility which 
define it as human nature, and among those instincts 
and sensibilities shame and remorse and hope and fear 
are forever found. 

What a picture rises before us when we are made to 
see a poor girl's life by the flash of the pistol-shot which 
has ended it ! In that flash we see the tinsel life of 
apparent splendor burned away, and the real, naked, 
sad life of misery and struggle manifested. In that 
same flash we see many hours of penitence and sorrow 
in the past, when on bended knees, with head buried 
in the dark room and in the mufflings of the Magda- 
len^s remorse, an aching heart sought intercourse with 
God. In that same flash we see the world ever pass- 
ing by on the other side with averted face and with the 
cynic's sneer, hard, cold, incredulous of good. In that 
same flash we see the thousand influences of bad men 
and bad women sweeping up with a rush against the 
better instincts, and whirling away a generous heart 
behind a light and giddy head, until head and heart 
alike are powerless before the ever-fiercer blasts of these 
furnaces of hell. In that same flash we see, if we had 
not seen it before, the remorseless increment of sin, be- 
ginning as a mere speck on a pure and healthy soul, 
deepening and spreading like a burning coal or a can- 
cerous ulcer, tainting as it spreads, with the pain and 
without the purification of elemental fire, until the 
flame dies away for fuel to feed it and the soul is a 
mass of corruption and death. In that same flash we 
read again the riddles of the Sphinx, the ever-obtrusive 



FALLEN WOMEN, 261 

mystery of this life, where passions are in their prime 
before reason is adolescent, where the uncontrollable 
influences about us which some call Fate, and some 
Noma, and some Providence, lift us like feathers from 
our footing and deposit us where they will. In that 
same flash we see a thousand times in the poor girPs 
tragic life where one word from us, one act of kindness, 
one beseeching invocation to virtue and to God, one 
single indication that her soul was cared for by the 
gentle and the pure, would have been enough to turn 
her to the Saviour's love and freshen her fevered life 
to all eternity. In that same flash, bringing out on 
the walls of our soul the blinding letters which in- 
dicted the ancient king, '^ weighed, weighed, wanting,'^ 
let us humbly and fearfully turn our eyes away from 
the poor girl's sin into the recesses of our own conscious- 
ness and reflect that the providence of God is admin- 
istered by human agencies at times, and that we are 
responsible for our brother and our sister, and that if 
we had done our duty in the imitation of Christ and 
in the exercise of a living faith, the poor creature who 
has blindly crashed through the limitations and fretting 
bars of mortal existence and carried a soul laden with 
sin and murder to the great assize might have been so 
different, might have lived yet many years in penitent 
sorrow and purity, and died at last, calmly, sweetly, 
with loving children pressing their young lips to hers, 
and her eyes, as they began to lose the light of earth, 
catching that other light which gladdened another 
Magdalen on Easter Day when she saw the risen 
Master and knew that Rabboni was alive again for- 



262 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

evermore. Let us not talk of destiny, of fate, of God's 
will, as if they relieved us of responsibility. However 
men may reason about the fixedness of God's purpose, 
be sure He never intended that men should see misery 
and not relieve it, or that He intended any evil which 
we might prevent. " Islam'' — " it is God's will" — is 
a grand word if it inspires men to bear the narrow 
things, the troubles and pains and miseries, which 
come to them personally. It seeks to express the 
thought of a Greater than any follower of Mohammed: 
" I can do all things through Christ which strength- 
eneth me." But it is a pernicious word, a soulless and 
cruel w^ord, if it teaches men and women that they are 
free from duty to others, that they cannot and dare not 
do anything against the ordinance of God. Above 
every other purpose and plan in the universe there 
rises the will of God that we should love one another 
even as He loved us, and that, as He laid down His 
life for us, even so we should be willing to lay down 
our lives for the brethren. 

2. I beg you to consider how, humanly speaking, it is 
impossible for those fallen creatures to escape from the 
life they lead. There is absolutely no way in which 
society offers them a retreat. It is no figure of speech 
that decent society closes its doors upon them. I am 
afraid that even the churches would be minded to put 
them away privately if they came to seek their blessings. 
I do not mean that there would be anything but sincere 
and hearty thankfulness on the part of every Christian 
at such a reformation. But practically the pathway 
of such a penitent would be a bitter and hard one. To 



FALLEN WOMEN. 263 

find a general shrinking away, a subtle distrust, a 
hardly-concealed air of patronage ; lo be made conspic- 
uous and stared at as if the conversion of a sinner 
were such an unforeseen episode in the church ; to be 
put into the galleries and to be made in every w^ay to 
feel inferiority and humiliation by those who profess 
to be sinners themselves, deserving as severe a punish- 
ment, and only saved from it by the atonement of Jesus 
Christ, — would be the experience of any who tried, I 
fear. It is to be expected that any criminal should be 
put upon probation and should endure some discipline 
in recovering lost character and forfeited reputation. 
The common interests of society demand some purga- 
tion and guarantee of good behavior before it can again 
rehabilitate the lawless and reinvest the dissolute with 
the sacred privileges which have been abused. But 
society should also furnish some means by which such 
purgation should be feasible; should erect seminaries 
and training-schools of virtue for those who wdsh to 
leave the institutions of vice ; should offer an asylum 
for all who would seek it, and a temporary home and 
living for those who would have no other. It is use- 
less to talk of repressing such evil by law or of regu- 
lating it by license so long as there is no avenue open 
to the sinner for an escape from its thraldom. As our 
society is constituted to-day, all the penitence of Mary 
Magdalen, blended with the remorse of Judas, might 
not prevent starvation in the case of any erring woman. 
What could she do to escape from the environment and 
habits of her life ? Every place that offered bread 
w^ould close at her approach. She might stand at the 



264 DANGERS AND DUTIES, 

entrance of the new world which she wants so ear- 
nestly to enter, and find that she had forgotten the 
password. Nothing that she could say would cause the 
heavy door to open. No home would oflPer itself to her. 
Slie could not rise above the station-houses and the level 
of the tenements. Her old associations would crowd 
upon her and weigh her down. With no bread, no 
occupation, no home, no general confidence in her, no 
refuge from the sin besetting her on all sides, is it any 
wonder she should fail ? Is it any wonder if so few 
try ? With a tremendous undertow dragging her down 
and an elevated and respectable world refusing to rec- 
ognize or support her, opposing only a weak but sin- 
cere desire to be better to the combined influence of an 
attracting evil and a repelling virtue, there is but little 
human hope for the escape of a fallen woman from the 
life she leads. Why have we not refuges and asylums 
to which penitents can fly and find a rest until the ten- 
der shoot of a reviving virtue has had time to strike 
its roots into a sustaining soil ? What a commentary 
it is upon our public policy that we provide homes for 
criminals and none for penitents ; that we say to every 
outcast, '^ If you do not violate the law, you must 
starve ; we can do nothing for you. If you want a 
roof to cover you and food to eat, you must qualify 
yourself by burglary, by arson, by homicide, by vio- 
lence" ! That is exactly the position which the social 
government of our day takes in reference to the vast 
element of population from Avhich the criminals come. 
The premium is placed upon crime. Honest poverty, 
unwilling vice, constrained immorality, are ignored 



FALLEN WOMEN. 265 

and despised. But if we could only be inspired to try 
the power of the sunbeams and lay aside the use of the 
storms in dealing with this iniquity and misery ; if we 
could confront the palaces of &in with yet finer palaces 
of virtue; if we could open a gate to heaven close by 
the portals that lead down to hell ; if a Christian world 
would do as much to save as a diabolical world does to 
destroy ; if we could clear away even a bridle-path for 
penitence to find its way back through the heavy under- 
growth of social prejudices and tangled obstructions, — 
we should be doing our duty to the unfortunate and the 
fallen. To call people to Christ and close up all the 
ways that lead to Him ; to preach repentance and yet 
make repentance an impossibility ; to plead eloquently 
to the prodigal to come back to the Father's house 
and at the same time bind her firmly to the swine- 
trough of her sin ; to lament the hardness of heart 
which keeps women away from the influences and 
blessings of virtue and religion and yet to keep them 
away from those influences by an iron hand, — is to trifle 
with them in the sight of God, is to push them, scream- 
ing, down the wild plunge of the cataract, while im- 
ploring them to take care and praying that they may 
escape. Look at our city to-night. Tell me, you 
mothers, happy in a home guarded by the invisible but 
potential influence of virtue, what single influence is 
working to rescue your sisters from the houses where 
virtue is a stranger and where the doors spring open 
at the hand of sin ? On the night-air there may be 
borne the sobs and cries of a breaking heart; in the 
silence of some chamber there may be an aching soul 

M 23 



2G6 DANGERS AND DUTIES. 

ill (luiiib wonder that so much prayer and so much 
grief seem to avail notliing in a heartless world. There 
may be — nay, in our knowledge of human nature we 
know tliere must be — mighty efforts made to break 
away the bindilig chains of an unliappy life, and there 
comes no angel to guide and encourage as there came to 
Peter in the dungeon. Slavery is not dead. Sin and 
custom, mighty tyrants, retain their grasp upon many 
discontented slaves. No auction-block, no negro cabin, 
no Siberian mine, ever witnessed a cruder servitude 
than that which many despised outcasts endure in 
whose soul the iron has entered, w^ho with remorse in 
their hearts and agony unspeakable shrink from the 
necessities of evil, and whose footsteps, if they seek to 
escape, are tracked by the bloodhounds of a remorseless 
social rigor. 

Around the innocence of our social life we draw the 
aw^ful circle of a Christless hate. Let sinful w^oman 
put but a foot within, and at her head, even if it wear 
a crown of holy purpose, we launch the curse of 
failure. 

A better and diviner spirit cries aloud in behalf of 
those poor things. Wisdom cries in the streets. It 
urges public expenditures, not in penal institutions, 
where crimes are expiated, but in reform and charita- 
ble institutions wdiere crimes are prevented. It im- 
plores hard and cruel souls to give to others the mercy 
they themselves expect. It bids the Church of God to 
follow the Saviour in His sweet and helping forgive- 
ness, and to tell a sneering and cynical world that it 
has in it the everlasting Spirit of Him whose love and 



FALLEN WOMEN. 267 

smile brought benisons on repentant Mary's face, and 
whose rebuke to Simon is her own to it : '' Simon^ I 
have somewhat to say unto thee. There was a cer- 
tain creditor which had two debtors^ the one owed five 
hundred pence and the other fifty. And when they 
had nothing to pay he frankly forgave them both. 
Tell me, therefore, which of them will love him most? 
Simon answered, and said, I suppose he to whom he 
forgave most. And he said unto him. Thou hast 
rightly judged. And he turned to the woman^ and 
said unto Simon, Seest thou this woman ? I entered 
into thine house; thou gavest me no water for my 
feet, but she hath washed my feet with tears, and 
wiped them with the hairs of her head. Thou gavest 
me no kiss, but this woman since the time I came in 
hath not ceased to kiss my feet. Wherefore I say 
unto thee, her sins, which are many, are forgiven ; for 
she loved much ; but to whom little is forgiven, the 
same loveth little. And he saith to the woman^ Thy 
faith hath saved ih^e ; go in peace.^^ 



THE END. 



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